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I do development in all of these versions of Visual Studio and just wondering- before I go out and buy Windows 8 if versions 2008 and 200 are compatible with Windows 8 and can I have all of them installed at the same time?

I tried to search google but nothing like this is there. I just found that upgrading with visual studio to windows 8 is not supported. Also I do not have any upgrade iso to test on virtual machines.

Thanks!

3 Answers 3

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You have always been able to install different versions of Visual Studio side by side since before version 2008 so you should be able to have them all installed at the same time (assuming that they all install of course!).

Visual Studio 2012 will install, obviously, as that's what you use to build Windows 8 applications.

This post is asking about a problem with a program built with Visual Studio 2008 installed on Windows 8

I have set up VS2008 on Win8 and now debugging how it works.

So it clearly can be installed.

As Visual Studio 2008 can be installed I would expect Visual Studio 2010 can be as well.

However, why do you need to have all three versions? Visual Studio can target earlier versions of .NET so unless you are sharing your projects with others who have to use these earlier versions or have to use features that are no longer supported (Windows phone 6.x projects for example), you could just install 2012.

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    Multi-targeting works for normal .net apps; but some other project types aren't supported going forward. VS2010 can't open windows phone 6.x projects. VS2012 can't open VS2010 installer projects. I still need to keep VS2003 around since multi-targeting never when back before the 2.0 framework; and one of the apps I'm on call to support if needed uses a 3rd party control library that won't play nice with anything newer than the 1.1 framework. Oct 30, 2012 at 14:38
  • @DanNeely - Good point.
    – ChrisF
    Oct 30, 2012 at 14:39
  • @DanNeely I would suggest a VM for such cases. I have found Windows Virtual PC to be easy to use and quite sufficient for supporting previous development environments. Oct 30, 2012 at 16:15
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    @JoshuaDrake if it was my computer, with what I considered an adequate amount of storage, I'd probably do so. With IT equipping computers with the smallest drives Dell will sell them and MSVPC running painfully slow on the C2D laptop I just retired it's yet to be a viable option for me at work. Oct 30, 2012 at 17:32
  • @DanNeely excellent point, I was spoiled, although our laptops themselves were older, we had SSD drives, and sufficient memory. Oct 31, 2012 at 12:28
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Yes, older versions of Visual Studio work fine on Windows 8 as desktop applications, and you can have multiple versions installed side-by-side.

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Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012 will work fine. You may go through some problem regarding VS 2008 but I'm sure you can troubleshoot the compatibility to make it work.

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