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

Chapter 4. Upgrading .NET

In This Chapter

• Deciding when to upgrade

• Converting Windows applications and class libraries

• Exploring conversion options for Web applications

• Using Visual Studio 2010 with previous versions of .NET

What does it mean to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010? Two tasks are required for an upgrade:

• Move to the Visual Studio 2010 toolset.

• Use version 4.0 of the .NET Framework.

Depending on your situation, you may decide to

• Start using Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 right away for all new development.

• Upgrade all your existing Windows and Web applications to Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0.

• 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 2010 while still using a previous version of the .NET Framework.

In this chapter, I talk about these scenarios and walk you through some conversion processes.

Making the Business Case for Upgrading

When you make the decision to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010, your existing applications must be converted to work with Visual Studio 2010 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 2010 uses version 4.0 of the .NET Framework by default. The syntax of programming languages, such as ...