With VS 2008 being released on Monday, let the project conversions begin! While I wish we could have had a single project and solution format that would have worked between VS 2005 and VS 2008, at least we can use VS 2008 to target .NET 2.0 only projects. Faced with converting about 100 different project files and solutions, the thought of manually opening each one and going through the upgrade wizard didn’t sound that appealing. Fortunately, there’s an easier way to automatically upgrade a solution or project: the /upgrade switch on DEVENV.EXE (the Visual Studio IDE itself).
Begin by opening a Visual Studio Command Prompt from the Start menu. Navigate to your project tree and execute “devenv /upgrade MySoln.sln” (without the quotes). Visual Studio will automatically upgrade the solution and all projects as well as create backups. Using the /upgrade switch is about a million times faster than the wizard!
There’s not a whole lot different between VS 2005 and VS 2008 projects. See DJ Park’s blog for the exact differences and how you could convert between them.