Converting between versions of .Net

[VBNetDude]

Well,

I unfortunately downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2010 and upgraded all my programs to .Net 4. I am really unhappy with the way 2010 runs. My computer keeps locking up for hours, programs take a long time to compile... Those are a couple of major issues.

Is there any patch I can download to open these Solutions in VS 2008 Pro? Maybe something I could edit (the solution file or something)? I had made a few important changes to a few projects that I wanted to keep. I will not have VS 2010 on my computer until, MAYBE, they release the full product.

[jmcilhinney]

There seem to be quite a lot of people making posts with VS 2010 in the title. Noone should be using VS 2010 except for testing purposes at the moment. Unless you're testing out the new features of the IDE or .NET 4.0 you shouldn't be using it, and then certainly not on your main computer. It's only at beta 2 so it's bound to be unstable and have bugs. It ridiculous to judge any software by its performance as a beta. You shouldn't install any beta software on any machine that you're not prepared to reinstall the OS on, which for most of us means a virtual machine.

As for the question, downgrading a solution from one version of VS to another is not that difficult. It just requires a bit of hand-editing of the text in the SLN and VBPROJ files. You'd need to change the target Framework version back to .NET 3.5 in VS 2010 first. Exactly what editing you need to do I'm not sure because I've never done it, but if you create a project in each version of the IDE and then open the SLN and VBPROJ files in Notepad you should be able to see the differences very easily.

[VBNetDude]

I have successfully done the text editing with WordPad. The post was helpful!

P.S. I don't judge programs just on the way their beta versions function. That would be ridiculous! I do, however, when problems like this come around, have to make the decision not to use a program that puts my life's work in jeopardy.I did make copies of my programs, but the files are corrupt. Besides that, I had made some changes that I wanted to keep. That's why I came here. And thank God that I found a good answer.

[jmcilhinney]

As I said, if this is your life's work then you shouldn't have been using VS 2010 in the first place. Once the RTM arrives, there's no reason to believe that it should be any less stable or suitable for production work than VS 2008 is. Until then, as with all beta software, it should be used for evaluation and testing purposes only. The exception would be if you want to start building an application now that specifically requires .NET 4.0. In that case you can begin now and do a final test when the RTM arrives. Otherwise, upgrading a current .NET 3.5 app to .NET 4.0 is pointless.