VS.NET 2005 & Different .NET versions

[irasmith]

Does anyone know if within VS.NET 2005 you will be able to access different .NET framework versions?

 

I realize that you would not have the advantages of the newer items available in the 2.0 .NET framework, but I was wondering if you would be able to have one version of VS.NET, yet still from within that version work with and continue to program your programs that are in a lower version of the .NET framework, such as those programs you are creating now with VS.NET 2003.

[Derek Stone]

No, that's not supported. However, there's nothing stopping you from building your projects outside of Visual Studio. MSBuild makes the process very easy.

[irasmith]

Thank you for letting me know how that will work. My main concern was not to jump the gun so to speak. I did not want to obtain VS.NET 2005 and load it before I was done working on my MCAD certification at the VS.NET 2003 level. I've started working on the certification and want to stay focused on one version and not deal with any other version until I am certified. :)

[irasmith]

I may have found a potential solution to my question, so here goes.

 

In VS.NET 2003, I right click on a project and select Properties.

 

Under Common Properties, under General, I click in the Supported Runtimes field, and then click on the elipses button that becomes visible.

 

There is a box that comes up indicating that VS.NET 2003 only builds for the .NET Framework 1.1, but that I can configure the application to run on .NET Framework 1.0. Naturally there is a warning indicating that not all 1.1 features are available in 1.0. Then it lets me select either the default 1.1 or the second option of both frameworks.

 

Just thought I'd share the information I found and I'll be looking to see if VS.NET 2005 has this same option.

[Derek Stone]

You can do the same thing outside of Visual Studio using the application's configuration file. The "requiredRuntime" and "supportedRuntime" elements are what you're looking for. It's a runtime feature, not a Visual Studio feature. The same feature is present in the .NET Framework 2.0.

[irasmith]

Thanks for the clarification on the matter. That is really cool to me that those options are there for us to use if we need them. The more I work on learning about .NET, the better I like it :cool: