The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Question on VS.NET

A quick question please. Is it possible to get VS .NET 2002 to work with .NET SDK version 1.1 or do I have to purchase VS.NET 2003 and if so where can i get VS.NET 2003 for a good deal?

Or does all of this = NULL;

TY
Friday, May 21, 2004

The official answer is that VS.Net 2002 will only work with .Net 1.0, and 2003 will only work with 1.1. Whether anyone's found a way around that yet I don't know...

There was a cheap upgrade from 2002 to 2003 ($29), but that was a promotional offer that MS ended back in September :(

Don't forget EBay though :)

http://search.ebay.com/visual-studio-net_Microsoft_W0QQfromZR8QQsacategoryZ46327QQsatitleZQ22visualQ20studioQ22Q20netQQsorecoZ2

Joe
Friday, May 21, 2004

Keeping mind, of course, that on eBay you get sellers advertising VS .NET "Professional" which is actually Academic (and sells retail for under $100), and Enterprise Architect which is actually an upgrade version, not a full version. Caveat emptor.

Kyralessa
Friday, May 21, 2004

VS.NET 2002 only COMPILES against the 1.0 SDK, but the apps made with 2002 can run on both 1.0 and 1.1, presuming you don't use anything that's been broken from 1.0 to 1.1 (there is a list somewhere, but I don't know it... Google for it).

VS.NET 2003 only COMPILES against the 1.1 SDK, but the apps made with 2003 can run on both 1.0 and 1.1, presuming you limit yourself to the 1.0 APIs, and again don't use any of the APIs that broke between 1.0 and 1.1. There is explicit support in 2003 for saying "this is a 1.0 project", which basically sets up binding rules in your app.config for preferring (or requiring) that the 1.0 framework is in place.

Since the 1.0 and 1.1 framework can be installed and run side by side (with a couple caveats), it's quite possible to configure your app to prefer and/or require specific versions of the runtime. There is copious documentation available at Microsoft and other places about this.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Saturday, May 22, 2004

"Since the 1.0 and 1.1 framework can be installed and run side by side (with a couple caveats), "

One of those caveats is that performance counters might not work within your application. We had several counters in an application and after we installed 1.1, we received a COM exception whenever we tried to access it. A little bit of Googling turned up a KB that article that effectively said "Oh, hey..perf counters probably won't work with both versions of the Framework installed."

Mark Hoffman
Saturday, May 22, 2004

http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/articles/7384.aspx

Anon
Monday, May 24, 2004