I was hoping that Microsoft would address the need to target earlier versions of Visual Studio within the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, but since they decided to punt, I tackled the problem myself. I’ve released my solution as an open source project named Daffodil for Visual Studio.
With Daffodil installed on your system along with earlier versions of Visual Studio, you can use the new native multi-targeting feature in Visual Studio 2010 to target those earlier versions. This makes it possible to use Visual Studio 2010 for building ObjectARX projects, for example. Daffodil performs essentially the same function that my VC Build Hook utility did in Visual Studio 2008 and 2005.
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Fantastic! Thank you sir!
Hi Owen,
Does this mean you’re now using VS2010 primarily for all your development needs, including older versions of AutoCAD that require, for example, VS2005? Warm regards from Los Angeles,
Emmanuel
I still use VS 2008 primarily. I’m in the process of moving a few projects to VS 2010, but there are still some problems unrelated to multi-targeting that I need to find reliable solutions for. One of the projects that I have already ported to VS 2010 targets AutoCAD versions back to AutoCAD 2000.
Super useful – thanks for providing this!
Useful tip in conjunction with Native Multi-Targeting – you can change the directory that is examined for platform toolset definitions, by setting the “MSBuildExtensionsPath32″ environment variable. If you do so, you should also copy the contents of the MSBuild directory (i.e. C:\Program Files\MSBuild or the equivalent) to whatever the environment variable is set to.
This might be useful if you’re checking in toolset definitions into source control.
Thank you!! Works great.
Do you have all the previous versions of VS (going back to 6.0) installed on a Win7 machine? If so, how? If not, what OS are you using?
Best Regards and Thanks!
Yes, I do have every version from VS 6.0 to VS 2010 installed on Windows 7 64-bit. The build tools for all of them work fine, however the VS .NET (VC 7.0) IDE does not work (it starts then immediately exits). I think I may have “installed” VS .NET by copying files and registry keys from a working installation on a Windows XP 32-bit VM.