After installing Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and opening an existing solution, you’ll be presented with a conversion wizard, much like you would when moving a VS2003 project up to VS2005. I’ve done some experimenting and so far, it seems like loading these newly converted projects back into Studio 2005 causes no problems. In fact, about all that’s changed in the project files is the version number and the addition of a very few XML elements that VS2005 could care less about.

Of course, solution files are completely incompatible. But that’s not such a big deal when you consider that the solution file isn’t a big deal to recreate. What I did was to simply make a copy of the solution file I typically use, and pass that through the project upgrade wizard instead. Voila. Now I have a solution that will work with 2005, and one that will work in 2008.

If you haven’t already tried out Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, I definitely recommend checking it out. Even if you don’t plan on using the new language and framework features like LINQ, there’s plenty of improvements to make it worth investigating. There’s even some VirtualPC images available, which makes trying it out a risk-free endeavor.

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