Visual Studio Hacks

Hack the Project and Solution Files #4

Chapter 1, Master Projects and Solutions

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HACK

Project and Solution File Conversion

Visual Studio does an excellent job of converting files from older versions to

newer versions. For instance, if you open a Visual Studio .NET 2002 solu-

tion in Visual Studio .NET 2003, it will first ask if you want to convert the

solution. After you say yes, it will convert all of your solution and project

files to the new version of Visual Studio .NET. Now what if you acciden-

tally converted those files and didn’t have a backup? Or perhaps you are

writing a solution in Visual Studio .NET 2003 and find out that your client

has only Visual Studio .NET 2002? One method would be to create a new

solution in the old version, create an identical project structure, and then

copy all the files over and add them to their respective projects. Thankfully,

there is a better solution. There is a tool available that will automatically

convert the project and solution files for you as well as the .resx files if you

are using Windows Forms.

The tool is called Visual Studio Converter 2.0 and can be downloaded from

http://www.codeproject.com/macro/vsconvert.asp.

This tool is simple to use. Figure 1-15 shows an example of this conversion

tool’s user interface.

To convert files, you first need to click the Add Files button and select all the

solution, projects, and .resx files for your solution. ...