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The development team I am joining all use VS 2010 Pro, possibly with TFS or some other SVN system. I placed an order to have it installed but our procurement process screwed up and it seems they have ordered 2012…
Are there any compatibility issues? It seems it will work with TFS 2010 but I remember going from 2008-2010 a lot of programs just broke plus they have to upgrade the project.
There’s a lot that’s improved from the VS2008 -> VS2010 scenario, and a bit that hasn’t (or has gotten worse).
Project Compatibility
In most cases, VS2012 will be able to open a VS2010 project without making incompatible changes. The main caveat to this is that the VS2010 user needs to have SP1 installed.
Some project types from VS2010 are no longer supported in VS2012. The top ones I can think of are Setup projects or Database projects. In VS2012, these projects simply won’t open (but if you don’t need to build them, possibly no harm done).
See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/03/28/round-tripping-with-visual-studio-11.aspx for more on this.
TFS compatibility
VS2012 should be compatible with TFS 2010, but any new functionality in VS2012 won’t be available (which is logical since the server doesn’t support it). For more, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997788.aspx#compat.
Runtime compatibility
VS2012 installs .NET 4.5 (also shipped in-box with Windows 8), which is an in-place upgrade of .NET 4.0 – it replaces all of the binaries, as opposed being a side-by-side releases like 3.0 and 3.5 were to 2.0.
There are a few runtime differences that you might encounter in .NET 4.5. Some of these may be bugs in 4.5 which may be fixed in a future hotfix, and some may be intentional changes (i.e. bugs from 4.0 fixed in 4.5). The point here being, if you do run into one of these issues, your fellow developers might not encounter the same issue. Then again, if you’re planning to support Windows 8, that could be a good thing.
(I don’t have a list of known incompatibilities between 4.0 and 4.5… if someone does, please feel free to edit).