Opening Visual studio in older version after converting to a higher version

I have many times faced a problem of converting a Visual studio project to a higher version (say 2010) and then someone coming to me and saying that it needs to be in the older version only.

But problem with Visual studio is, once you convert from a lower to higher version, that project will not open back in the lower version. You may a error saying “The project was created using higher version and cannot be open”.

Well, i have found out a quick way to overcome this problem.

Every project file (.csproj OR .vbproj) is nothing but an XML File. When you convert a project, what it does is update few values in the XML file. What you need to do is, undo the changes done by the converter in the project XML file and you are good to go. To do that, Right click on the project file & edit it with your favorite editor (like notepad++).

Once you open it, search for the line shown in below screen shot.

Notice the “v9.0” this what tells Visual studio which version to use to open the project. So if you have converted a Project from VS 2008 to VS 2010, then this particular value would be “V10.0“. To open it back with VS 2008, just change it to “v9.0” and then you should be able to open it with VS 2008.

Hope this quick & handy tip helps you 🙂

Technorati : microsoft visual studio, visual studio, vs 2008, vs 2010
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Even Microsoft can be stupid :) (Installing silverlight tools for vs 2008)

Yesterday I was trying to install Silver Light tools for Visual studio 2008. I downloaded the pre requisites (will explain later in the post what all are pre requisite). When I went to Microsoft download center to download Silver Light tools for VS2008, it showed me a pop up saying “Please install Silver Light Plugin” and I did. After downloading the tools when I tried to install, it showed up an error “Fatal error, cannot continue”. After re searching a lot I got to know that I need to uninstall the silver light plugin before I can install Silverlight tools. Now that’s weird, Microsoft is only telling you to download the plugin when you visit the download section and then it tools fail because of plugin. Now that’s great! I hope Microsoft knows about this.

So here is what you need to have Silverlight tools for VS 2008.

1.       You should have VS 2008

2.       You should install VS 2008 SP 1. You can get it here.

3.       You should uninstall Silver light plugin before you continue.

4.       Then download Silver light tools for VS 2008. You can get it here.

If you follow the above 4 steps you will face no problems in getting silver light tools for VS 2008. Cheers !