Question

Currently we are doing a payroll application in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (.Net 3.5) using some of the latest features like WCF, WF and the development for the same has almost completed.

However, clients have shown their interest in migrating the developed payroll application in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (.Net 3.5) to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (.Net 4.0).

I don’t have an idea about the expected challenges in the migration or if its just going to be very smooth.

Any thoughts or comments?

Answer 1

There should be no challenges. All of your 3.5 code will work as it had when built with VS 2008.

If you do a Google search you’ll find many articles titled something like “What’s new in 2010”. You won’t find things like “What’s Different”

Except for this little tidbit From MSDN:

The .NET Framework 4 is highly
compatible with applications that are
built with earlier .NET Framework
versions, except for some changes that
were made to improve security,
standards compliance, correctness,
reliability, and performance.

The .NET Framework 4 does not
automatically use its version of the
common language runtime to run
applications that are built with
earlier versions of the .NET
Framework. To run older applications
with .NET Framework 4, you must
compile your application with the
target .NET Framework version
specified in the properties for your
project in Visual Studio, or you can
specify the supported runtime with the
Element in an
application configuration file.

The see the article

Also:

If your application or component does
not work after .NET Framework 4 is
installed, please submit a bug on the
Microsoft Connect Web site.

That tells me that 4.0 is meant to be perfectly backwards compatible, and if not, then it’s something they need to fix.