Completely off topic: did you know there is a Toby Sharp at MS? Your T# made me look for T#, Tobi sharp, Tsharp, so I finally found him here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/tsharp/

Then create a new 2005 proj and paste the whole 2009 proj (except the .csproj and .sln) file in to the directory of 2005 proj. From the solution explorer – click “Show all items” and then include everything into your proj. For the dataset xsd mapping the database – you might have to remap the database. Clean the solution and recompile it.

bingo .. its done ! hope this helps

I added it as a post build event to my vs2008 project

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Text;

using System.IO;

using System.Xml;

namespace VS2008ToVS2005

{

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

if (args.Length == 2)

{

if (File.Exists(args[0]))

{

XmlNamespaceManager nameSpaceManager = null;

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();

doc.Load(args[0]);

nameSpaceManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(doc.NameTable);

nameSpaceManager.AddNamespace(“msb”, @”http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003″);

//<Project ToolsVersion=”3.5″

XmlElement el = doc.SelectSingleNode(@”//msb:ProductVersion”,nameSpaceManager) as XmlElement;

if (el != null && el.InnerText == @”9.0.30729″)

{

el.InnerText = @”8.0.50727″;

}

el = doc.SelectSingleNode(@”//msb:Project”, nameSpaceManager) as XmlElement;

if (el != null && el.Attributes["ToolsVersion"] != null)

{

el.Attributes.Remove(el.Attributes["ToolsVersion"]);

}

el = doc.SelectSingleNode(@”//msb:Import”, nameSpaceManager) as XmlElement;

if(el != null && el.Attributes[@"Project"] != null)

{

el.Attributes["Project"].InnerText = @”$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets”;

}

if (File.Exists(args[1]))

{

File.Delete(args[1]);

}

doc.Save(args[1]);

return;

}

}

Console.WriteLine(“Usage :”);

Console.WriteLine(“VS2008ToVS2005 “);

Console.WriteLine(“eg. “);

Console.WriteLine(” VS2008ToVS2005 stuff_2k8.csproj stuff_2k5.csproj “);

}

}

}

I had to worry about the same thing where I work. We have a source control project in VS2005 and the people here weren’t too thrilled to switch to VS2008 if it meant that everyone had to switch at the same time.

Thanks for the info above. The SLN file was indeed found to be incompatible. PRJ files and Typed Datasets went through some conversions too. But these were found to be compatible with VS2005.

Hope Microsoft can fully appreciate the difficulties developers can face when trying to introduce new Versions of Visual Studio. They did a much better job this time. But it’s funny how even very small items can become “show-stoppers” in an environment using the latest software that they are licensed for.

Thanks!