Visual Studio® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Installing Visual Studio Professional

In This Chapter

• Using multiple versions of Visual Studio

• Meeting the system requirements for Visual Studio

• Installing Visual Studio

• Launching Visual Studio

As long as you have adequate hardware resources to run Visual Studio, getting it up and running is a straightforward process. You might spend all day waiting for the software to install, but then you can stay up all night playing around with all its cool new features. This chapter gives you the details.

Installing Versions Side by Side

You can use any release version of Visual Studio, from Visual Studio 6.0 through Visual Studio 2010, on a single computer. Of course, I don't recommend opening all the versions at one time. Here are the versions:

• Visual Studio 6.0

• Visual Studio .NET

• Visual Studio .NET 2003

• Visual Studio 2005

• Visual Studio 2008

• Visual Studio 2010

If you installed beta versions or any other prerelease version of Visual Studio 2010 on your computer, you should uninstall them completely before installing the final version of Visual Studio 2010.

Warning

As a rule, after you open an older version of a solution in the next version of Visual Studio, you can no longer open the solution in the previous version. For example, if you open a Visual Studio 2005 solution in Visual Studio 2010, you can no longer open the solution in Visual Studio 2005. Visual Studio makes a backup of the files it changes as part of the upgrade process (unless you tell it not to do so). Nevertheless, it's a good ...