Visual Studio Compatibility
If you're interested in learning more about the compatibility plans for Visual Studio Codename "Orcas", this is the post for you.
For products as complex as Visual Studio, achieving seamless compatibility between versions is an immense and ever growing task. This being the case, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time and energy to reduce the barriers experienced by users after upgrading to Orcas.
One of the efforts that I’ve been involved with over the past several months is the design time compatibility for Visual Studio. In a nutshell, design time compatibility refers to the experience Orcas users will have when working with projects, solutions, and assets from previous versions of Visual Studio. I’ve outlined these experiences in the document that I've attached to this post . We're still flushing out some details but I would love to get your feedback on what we have so far so please feel free to comment on this post or send me an email at djpark@microsoft.com. More specifically, I’m interested in the following:
- What are your thoughts on our current plans?
- What are your priorities when it comes to compatibility?
- Have you run into any bugs or noticed any general areas related to compatibility that you feel need improvement? If so, what are they?
As a side note, run time compatibility is another interesting area where we’ve put a lot of effort, so if you have any comments or questions about that, I’d love to hear them as well.
As a final side note, check out Jason Zander's blog post from the days of Visual Studio 2005 for more useful information about compatibility.