Visual Studio® 2008 ALL-IN-ONE DESK REFERENCE FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter II.1. Installing Visual Studio Professional

As long as you have adequate hardware resources to run Visual Studio, getting it up and running is a straightforward process. You might spend all day waiting for the software to install, but then you can stay up all night playing around with all its cool new features. This chapter gives you the details.

Installing Versions Side by Side

You can use any release version of Visual Studio, from Visual Studio 6.0 through Visual Studio 2008, on a single computer. Of course, we don't recommend opening all the versions at one time. Here are the versions:

• Visual Studio 6.0

• Visual Studio 2002

• Visual Studio 2003

• Visual Studio 2005

• Visual Studio 2008

If you installed beta versions or any other prerelease version of Visual Studio 2008 (code name Orcas) on your computer, you must uninstall them completely before installing the final version of Visual Studio 2008. For more information, see

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/vs2008/bb964521.aspx

Warning

As a rule, after you open an older version of a solution in the next version of Visual Studio, you can no longer open the solution in the previous version. For example, if you open a Visual Studio 2002 solution in Visual Studio 2003, you can no longer open the solution in Visual Studio 2002. Be sure to have backups of all your solutions before you start opening them in different versions.

Taking a look at all the .NETs

You can have multiple versions of the Microsoft .NET Framework installed on a single computer. These ...