I have an existing Visual Studio 2005 project for which I get a conversion wizard prompt when opening in the freshly installed Visual Studio 2010. What are the implications of carrying out this conversion? Converting to anything more recent than 2010 is not an option.
The conversion process is usually pretty seamless, it will take your 2005 project and upgrade it to a 2010 project.
It should not be an issue unless you have projects with 3rd party components which, for whatever reason, do not like the newer version of Visual Studio. The only one I've ever had a problem with is Crystal Reports and that was going from a .NET 1.1 project in VS2003 to .NET 4.0 in VS2010. (But hey, one does not simply do things with Crystal Reports)
The conversion wizard will also back up your old project if you tell it to, although I would hope it's in source control of some kind anyway.
Of course, people who only have VS2005 on their machine will no longer be able to open your upgraded 2010 project, you are effectively committing to VS2010. It can always later be upgraded to VS201x at a later date if this becomes an option.
Related
I installed VS 2022 Community and am trying to work on a project that was developed on VS 2008 Pro. VS is giving me this report:
How do I force VS to make whatever upgrades it needs in order to run this program? I can provide more info if needed.
MS in their wisdom, dropped support for the Setup & Deployment project, can't remember when exactly, then after a bit of an uproar re-instated it through the Visual Studio marketplace https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualStudioClient.MicrosoftVisualStudio2017InstallerProjects
Since your project has a file .vddproj, it might be a Smart Device CAB project.
It is not supported by later versions of visual studio.
It is recommended that you open it with VS2008.
I ran Dependency Walker on an assembly (.exe) after compiling in Debug (Any CPU) and it seems like there are older core and kernel issues. The entire code is VB.NET 2010, so I am wondering why VS2017 Pro didn't clean those out?
Something interesting was that the Conversion to a new VS version did not occur, for which errors are shown -- it just showed the forms, modules, etc. as if there were no errors.
Should I try a Reload or something?
The errors were caused by having old references or assembly libraries which called DLLs (like VBIDE.dll and MSCORE.DLL) in the applications folder. There were very old references, some of which were to VB6.
Recall, remember that Visual Studio has always been dropping certain Windows forms controls over VB 2005, VB 2008, VB2010, etc. so you need to make sure those older controls are not in forms when you upgrade to e.g. VS 2017.
I have already using Visual Studio 2010 for my project. Now I have to work with a Visual Basic 2006 legacy application. Can I install VB 2006 Enterprise Edition on my system?
Will this affect Visual Studio 2010?
Yes. Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 6 will happily install side-by-side.
You can run multiple versions of Visual Studio on the same machine. I currently have VS2003, VS2005, VS2008 and VS2010 installed and am using all of them.
Where you may get into problems is with something like hooking up the older ones to TFS. This can be done, as I have VS2003 and VS2008 connected to TFS2010, but my VS2005 won't work as it whinges about the provider for some reason.
Another area to watch out for is IIS. As you have already installed VS2010, IIS may be defaulting to .Net 4.0 so if you start deploying .Net 2.0 apps then the websites may not work without some adjustment of things like app pools.
But if you are just using them independently of each other then you should be fine. If you're really paranoid, consider creating a VM and installing the old VS on it.
EDIT
I see from your edited post that you were talking about VB6. This also can be installed alongside any of the later versions of Visual Studio.
I want to convert my old vb6 project to a vb.Net solution, when I open do: File->Open->Convert this is what I get:
And I can't find a way to show the available converters...
I have try:
Installing framework 1.0 since I read somewhere that it's needed
Tried to install framework 2.0 but it's says "I have it" but it's not showing in the uninstall programs list
Tried to install framework 3.0, same as before.
I even try to add the Microsoft.VisualBasic.UpgradeWizard.dll via regasm but I can't open a console command in VS2008, only in VS2010 and I have read that VS2010 can't handle the conversion from vb6 to vb.net, it has to pass over VS2008 first.
Thanks in advance!
Well, the solution was to install Visual Studio 2005, then the converters were available:
I suppose I needed Framework 1.0.
It's not perfect, it has some errors, but its a step forward for a complete solution.
Of course I've found some other 3rd party conversion programs, but they are expensive:
ArtInSoft
Visualwebgui
Hope it helps someone else!
No clue what that Convert dialog is for--there's nothing in the help on it.
According to this Forum Post, you can open the vbp in Visual Studio and it should ask to convert the project (no option to open a .vbp file in VS 2010). However, even if it still did that in VS 2010, it's a tremendously bad idea.
See also this post on converting VB6 to VB.NET.
Also, check these duplicated SO questions:
VB6 to VB.NET Conversion
How to Switch a Large App From Vb6 to VB.net
Best Strategy for Moving from VB6 to .NET
Edit:
According to this MSDN Page, the conversion wizard only goes up to Visual Studio 2005
Edit Edit: Per MarkJ's comment, Visual Studio 2008 includes the upgrade wizard. It's gone in VS 2010.
Is there a way to make VS2008 work with the old (vs2005 crystal reports) assemblies and not require any updates to be installed in the client machines?
We have upgraded a Visual Studio 2005 .net 2.0 solution to Visual Studio 2008. The purpose is to take advantage of the IDE improvements and because it supports multi targeting. The solution still has to be built against .net 2.0.
It all works as advertised, we rebuild and run it in a machine with only .net 2.0 installed. But during testing we get an exception when we try to show a Crystal Report that is included with the application.
Then upon review we find out that without telling us, Visual Studio changed the references to the crystal assemblies and pointed our solution to the updated versions that come with vs2008, which requires crystal runtime be updated on client machines.
We did try removing the references and adding the old ones but it won't compile.
don't use Crystal reports
You could try to put all reports in a separate project. Then create a second visual studio solution in VS2005 which uses the same project (add existing project).
Then use VS2005 for editing your reports. Create a library directory for your references in vs2008 and reference the vs2005 dll's.
Don't know for sure if it works, but it could be worth a try.
We tried this and ultimately just ended up upgrading all of our machines internally to the latest and (not so) greatest.
I would just bite the bullet and upgrade. I've found some performance improvements in the Crystal Reports 2008 for some data intensive reports.
We ran into the same problem. You can have the project reference the old DLLS, which works but can lead to DLL hell. Having fought that kind of battle before, I can't recommend it.
After exploring the Crystal Reports site for a long time, I came to the conclusion that there is no good way to solve this problem short of upgrading to Crystal Reports 2008 or switching to a different reporting engine.
In our case, we had not yet developed a large number of Crytal Reports, and our reporting needs are modest. We switched to the Microsoft Reporting Technology that is bundled into Visual Studio. It took a bit of effort to figure out, but so far it looks like it will do anything we will ever need. Not upgrading Crystal Reports saved us a non-trivial amount of money.
Hope this helps.
don't use Crystal reports
You could try to put all reports in a separate project. Then create a second visual studio solution in VS2005 which uses the same project (add existing project). Then use VS2005 for editing your reports. Create a library directory for your references in vs2008 and reference the vs2005 dll's.
Don't know for sure if it works, but it could be worth a try.