Will VS2012 work with TFS2010?

Question

I am considering using VS2012 RC to write coded user interface tests (since VS2010 SP2 FP2 does not fully support IE9).

Currently, my test projects are contained in a solution that is related to our TFS team project. I also created an assembly definition to create a project when testing new code (assemblies are performed on our assembly machine).

I believe that if I upgrade my solution to VS2012, then in order to build the solution on the build machine, I need VS2012 RC, right? But then is it possible to indicate in my build definition for my project that VS2012 will be built instead of VS2010?

Is it possible to upgrade my VS2012 project using TFS2010? I should note that my solution will be the only one updated to VS2012. All other solutions in the company still need to be built by VS2010. I assume that upgrading the entire company to VS2012 will not be in place for at least a few months.

Or do I need a separate assembly machine or something else?

Any thoughts, ideas or solutions are appreciated!

UPDATE: I tried and it worked fine. My only problem is that the Coded UI tests that I did not have after reassembling on my build machine, but I suppose I will probably need to ask something about other places. To clarify, the solution was successfully built, but the tests still failed.

Answer 1

Changes in Visual Studio 2012 allow most types to still open Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1, so it depends on what projects are in your solution - see this page for a full list of compatibility:

If you created your assets in Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1), many of them will load and run in Visual Studio 2012 without any further action on your part. Many assets will open again in Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) without any problems, even after opening these assets in Visual Studio 2012.

See also "Round-Off with Visual Studio 11" on the VS blog for more details.

Note that if your build process uses custom build operations, then just installing Visual Studio 2012 violates the build definition on your local computer , and that MVC1 or MVC2 projects are simply not supported by VS2012. Oh, and Visual Studio 2012 is no longer RC, it was RTM'd last week.

Answer 2

(I assume you mean RTM RT, not RC, now that the latest release is available)

Theoretically (from what I read) VS2012 and VS2010 use the same project / solution file format, so you can switch between them without any compatibility issues (including, apparently, from obvious things, such how the creation of new file types, VS2010 does not understand)

TFS updates have historically been backward compatible, so you can usually use different versions of the client and server (but usually you need a compatibility package installed for old clients on new servers, the new client working with the old server was normal, it was ok), therefore I expect this to work well.

I would try, but before you sign up, check all the files that appear in VCS2012 Pending Changes to make sure that it has not changed anything that might cause problems. The worst thing that can happen is that your development machine receives a “corrupt” version of the code, and you will need to return to 2010.

(This is the approach I used with our 130-project C # solution, and so far (1 day) it works great except for the new user interface, due to which my eyes bleed when they try to find information in all indistinguishable monochrome mess)