I have had about 5 people ask me about Visual Studio .NET 2003/2005 and Windows Vista, so I thought I would just post it up.

The core links to refer to are:

 Visual Studio on Windows Vista

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Beta and Visual Studio support for Vista

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Beta

Some key points to take note:

 
1. Some changes in Vista will impact Visual Studio and thus we're unable to support Visual Studio .NET 2002 or Visual Studio .NET 2003 on Windows Vista.  Its about time to upgrade anyways.  Check out the Web Application Projects if you hate the way 2005 does its default project structure.

2. Your existing .NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0 based applications will continue to work on Windows Vista, and will be able to take advantage of many of the new features available to Windows Vista applications.

 3.  For developers using Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista, Microsoft is in current development on an update to Service Pack 1 called the ‘Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Vista Refresh Beta’. This update builds on the improvements made in SP1 and delivers a first class experience for developers wanting to take advantages of the new features in Windows Vista. The Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista is expected to ship after the consumer availability of Windows Vista in Q1 of 2007 and is now available in beta. [DOWNLOAD: Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Beta]

4 Comments

• irascian said Monday, February 5, 2007 3:49:26 PM

  Given the date of this post the comment "expected to ship after the consumer availability of Windows Vista" is rather confusing - after all that "consumer availability" happened a week ago.

• Alex said Monday, February 5, 2007 6:12:47 PM

  The change of platform requires change of everything.

• Chakris said Tuesday, June 12, 2007 10:02:07 PM

  Which version of Vista supports VS 2005 like Vista Home,Premium or Ultimate. And which version of SQL Server ??

• Eric Smith said Thursday, January 31, 2008 7:23:43 AM

  I know this is an old issue; however, has there been any new development toward supporting VS 2003. Unfortuantely, I have a couple of hundred VS 2003 project I still support and can't take the time to upgrade. Of course, we are developing anything new in VS 2005. We are also looking to VS 2008 (will VS 2008 allow us to target .NET 1.1 so we can use it instead of VS 2005.). Any news or help?