You may have noticed (well, probably not, I don't think this blog has made it mainstream yet, but if you stumble across this blog from an errant Google search, welcome), a flurry of posts today, which make up for the lack of posts in the last 2 weeks. My company, has just competed it's migration (for the most part) from VS 2005 to VS 2008. I am happy to say, that I was a key driving force in the adoption of VS 2008 (Beta 2), and was the first one on the team to use it for work related tasks.

One of the biggest tasks, was the migration of our TFS server, from 2005 to 2008, running on a new VM, in a new domain (that knows nothing of the previous domain). I have 2 posts about this migration (here and here), which had me putting in some long nights (4:30am, 2:30am, 1:30am), and a low WAF (wife acceptance factor). Since TFS is a production server, most of the work had to be done after hours. Most of the problems I encountered, were not do to TFS, but just moving a production server in general. The tfsAdmin tool could stand a few extra functions to support moving between domains, but in the end, I lucked out do to the small team size, and small number of open work items.

With the multi-targeting feature of VS 2008 (compile projects against .Net 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5), it was mostly backwards compatible with our VS 2005 development environment. I only ran into a few issues where I had to do some work work around's as to not break everybody else still running on VS 2005.

• New Code Analysis Rules
• New compiler, which thru a couple of new errors
• Test projects would always be set to use version 9.* of the TestTools dll. That along with a few other nuances, was the biggest issue.

Now that everyone (well almost everyone, and I can't comment on who isn't at this point, but let's just say we don't have direct control over their development tools) is running VS 2008, the few incompatibilities are gone, and our new build server will be rocking real soon. I need to work on a checklist of new IDE features to make sure I take advantage of them. After using VS 2005 for the past 2 years, it's easy to get into a routine and miss out on the new features.

One thing that I haven't commented yet on, is the stability of the Beta 2 build. 2 words, ROCK SOLID. They could have just labeled it RTM.