Visual Studio 2010 Solution (Beta 2) in Visual Studio 2008

Question

Is there a way to open a solution file saved in Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 in Visual Studio 2008? ... or maybe a way to convert it?

When I tried to open it in VS 2008, I received the error message "The selected file is a solution file, but was created by a newer version of this application and cannot be opened."

Answer 1

If you open the .csproj file in a text editor (it's just XML), you will see a line, for example:

 <ProductVersion>9.0.30729</ProductVersion> 

(this is from VS 2008 project)

The first line of the 2008 .sln file is as follows:

Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Version 10.00 Format

The 2010 version numbers will be different - just change them to these values ​​(or those that you get from creating a new 2008 project on your system).

Back up the files first.

Answer 2

This is not a supported script to open a .sln file created since 2010 in 2008. This is true for trying to open any .sln file saved in a newer version of Visual Studio with the old one.

What you can do is open the .sln file in notepad and decrease the version number by 1. This will allow you to open the .sln file, but the operation will still fail, since you will have to convert all the projects as well.

Answer 3

Today I ran into this problem. I created a VS2008 project and simply added to files from another project. Most of the code written in 2010 doesn’t really use the features of 2010 - at least for the code that I reviewed, it imported files without any problems.

Answer 4

Project projects and Visual Studio solutions are plain text.

You need to open the .sln and .csproj in a text editor, compare the VS2010 versions with the VS2008 versions and change the version numbers to match.

Answer 5

You will need to compare the .sln and. * proj files between versions. I know that the structure is very different from 2003 to 2008. In the end, you better create a new project and copy the files between the two

Answer 6

Why not create a new VS2008 solution manually and add the source code instead of hacking into the .sln file. Remember that VS2010 is an early beta and not ready, and the timeline for release was dropped due to the growing number of people complaining about it.

Hope this helps, Regards, Tom.

Answer 7

While other users have stated the truth if the project contains or (maybe not 100% accurate, but look for something along these lines)

You will need to remove them as syntax for client 3.5, and client 4.0 is different from VS2010 than in 2008.