Visual Studio® 2008 ALL-IN-ONE DESK REFERENCE FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter II.4. Upgrading .NET

In This Chapter

What does it mean to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008? Two tasks are required for an upgrade:

• Move to the Visual Studio 2008 toolset.

• Use version 3.5 of the .NET Framework.

Depending on your situation, you might decide to

• Start using Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 right away for all new development.

• Upgrade all your existing Windows and Web applications to Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5.

• Leave all or some of your existing applications in the versions of Visual Studio with which they were created.

• Upgrade your existing applications to Visual Studio 2008 while still using a previous version of the .NET Framework.

This chapter talks about these scenarios and walks you through some conversion processes.

Making the Case for an Upgrade

When you make the decision to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008, your existing applications must be converted to work with Visual Studio 2008 before they can be opened. In most cases, the conversion process doesn't change your code. Instead, it merely updates configuration files, such as project and solution files. The changes that are made depend on whether you're converting

• Windows applications

• Web applications

• Class libraries

Note

Visual Studio 2008 uses version 3.5 of the .NET Framework by default. The syntax of programming languages, such as C# and Visual Basic, changes incrementally with each new version of the .NET Framework as new features are added and existing features are improved. The conversion process doesn't update ...