17

Will Visual Studio 2008 be supported by new .NET 4 from the get go?

I'm particularly interested in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and the parallel task library, which I would use immediately.

Is it worth upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 when it comes out?

jessehouwing
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scope_creep
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    That would be quite restraining, don't you think? I'd rather not tie their hands by backward compatibility with older VS. – Kugel Dec 31 '09 at 17:59
  • Related: *[Can I develop for .NET Framework 4 in Visual Studio 2008?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1836410)* – Peter Mortensen Jul 22 '15 at 19:23

4 Answers4

34

No. VS2008 will not be able to target .NET 4.0:

[...] Visual Studio 2010 supports .NET 4 and earlier projects. Visual Studio 2008 supports .NET 3.5SP1 projects.

Source, comment posted by Polita Paulus

General Grievance
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Michael Petrotta
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12

While you can't use .NET 4.0 itself from VS2008, if you're interested in the Parallel Extensions stuff, you could download the Reactive Framework (formerly LINQ to Rx) which I believe contains at least a lot of Parallel Extensions backported to .NET 3.5 SP1.

From the Release Notes, it includes:

System.Threading, backport of Parallel Extensions for .NET 4 to .NET 3.5 SP1

  • Task for executing asynchronous operations.
  • Concurrent Collections such as ConcurrentStack, ConcurentQueue ad ConcurrentDictionary.
  • PLINQ for writing parallel queries.
  • addition Threading operations such as Barrier,SpinLock and SpinWait.
Jon Skeet
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2

If you want to know whether upgrading to VS 2010 will be worth it, then download beta 2 now, and try it out. Run it in a virtual machine if you don't trust it on a normal development machine. Run through some of the PDC videos showing the new features. Go through the Training Courses.

And above all, tell Microsoft what you think.

John Saunders
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1

Historically - No.

Starting with 2008 the IDE has been able to target lower version frameworks, but I doubt they will ever target a newer version framework.

Brian Schmitt
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