Does Visual Studio 2010 support .NET 4.5 CTP?

Question

... or do I absolutely need Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview?

I'm mostly concerned with ReSharper support; 6.1 EAP isn't available yet.

I'm going to be making a WPF 4.5 greenfield application (as I need some of the new features) and I'm wondering what's going to provide the least resistance for upgrading down the line.

Answer 1

You are already using it if you deployed either .NET 4.5 or VS 11 on your machine. .NET 4.5 is not a side-by-side version, it replaces 4.0. I haven't heard anybody complaining about it, except for people using PostSharp which doesn't handle type forwarding well.

I you haven't yet done so then do not take this as advice to install it. Few programmers can afford CTP releases on a production machine. Use a VM or a non-critical machine.

Answer 2

I just installed VS2012, works okay but my programs that use FFTW refuse to load the DLL. I tried to go back and build again with VS2010 ... and now I find that ALL of my projects when compiling in VS2010 generate this error:

fatal error LNK1123: failure during conversion to COFF: file invalid or corrupt

I found out that was because of .NET 4.5, so I uninstalled .NET 4.5 and installed .NET 4.0 and now everything works again in VS2010 ... but now, VS2012 will not even run, it just shows the splash screen for a second and then terminates with the error "Operation could not be completed".

It does not look to me like it is possible to use both VS2010 and VS2012 on one system, and the reason being that VS2010 will not link properly with .NET 4.5 installed, and VS2012 will not run without it.

Answer 3

It does not work in .NET 4.5 with EF 5 either. Seems Microsoft kind of overlooked their own AdventureWorksLT2008R2 sample database. One table and one stored procedure will not import into EF 5 due to the hierarchyid field type.

If they keep this up they will render themselves obsolete. Java on the other hand does support hierarchyid and spatial data types.

Answer 4

I install .NET 4.5 Developer preview from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=27541 .

So far it works great with VS 2010 SP1 on my PC and ReSharper 6.1 EAP (which is available now http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/ReSharper/ReSharper+6.1+Nightly+Builds ) also works great, especially latest build which you consider like RC.

As side note, I also have .NET Async CTP & ASP.NET MVC 4 installed and it also seems to work with both. You can utilize latest .NET 4.5 performance improvements & features and you do not need to do any update to VS 11 Developer Preview, unless you required to build Metro Style applications as far as I know.

So for developer environment, I can recommend to update to .NET 4.5 now. I am sure in most cases it will not introduce significant issues. HOWEVER, In case if you concentrate on WPF 4.5 development, you VS11 be effected by some compatibility issues, so it may be interesting for you to install VS11 in VM to do WPF related development here and use VS11 build-in XAML editor etc.

Answer 5

Unless your app is not going to ship until next year, I wouldn't bother developing against the CTP just yet. My understanding is that the beta is expected in february, and Preview releases often change quite a bit (including the API).

If it were me, i'd wait until at least Beta 1, but be prepared to wait until at least next fall for a go-live license.