Moving a solution from Visual Studio 2010 to 2008

Question

I was asked to build a solution for our client on our server which has 2010 Visual Studio and was not informed that the client has a 2008 Visual Studio on their server. Now I was asked to move my solution into their server and don't have an approval to upgrade them (silly isn't it?). Does anyone know of a way to do this? I know the other way around is quite simple but this is sort of a downgrade.

Answer 1

It's a while ago I had to do this, but I think I only had to change the project file (not a solution-file); Open the project files (*.vbproj or *.csproj) and downgrade the value in the attribute ToolsVersion (3.0 to 2.0?).

Or compare two (empty) projectfiles with each other to see the differences between VS2010 and VS2008.

Answer 2

Visual Studio has a facility for creating a project from source files. You could remove all of the non-source-code files from a copy of the working project then import those files into another version of Visual Studio to create a new solution. Many versions of Visual Studio have the command menu => File => New => Project From Existing Code . That command then shows a series of prompts to set up the new project. See this page for more details.