Saturday, March 10, 2012

Visual Studio 11 Solution Compatibility

If you have started using the Visual Studio 11 Beta, you may not know this, but Microsoft has finally decided not to change the solution and project compatibility of Visual Studio 11 files!!

So what does this mean?

Well, it means that you can now develop using Visual Studio 11 Beta and if you decide that you do not like it after all, you can seamlessly revert to using Visual Studio 2010 to edit the solution and project!  Yup, absolutely no conversion required!!

From a business perspective, however, the best part of this change is that it allows developers to easily interact with a solution even while working on different versions of the IDE.  If you have developers that wish to use Visual Studio 11 to develop certain features and functionality or wish to use some of the new project templates or debugging features, they can continue to use Visual Studio 11, while developers who want to continue using Visual Studio 2010 or are unable to upgrade (such as overseas developers) can all collaborate on the same solution and project files with no perceptible difference.

What an amazing concept!  Development teams no longer have to scramble to get each and every developer on the same version of the IDE!  Each individual (or development group) can migrate to the new version of the IDE at their own pace or comfort level.

NOTE:Compatibility between solutions and project files will only be maintained if the development team is on Visual Studio 2010 SP1.  Visual Studio RTM will still require a conversion.

Now, if Microsoft can just do the same thing with supporting older versions of Visual Studio Extensions....

No comments:

Post a Comment