building ironruby for VS2008

Question

I am trying to build Ironruby for VS 2008 but the project files require VS 2010 and .net 4.0. Unfortunately I cannot use that as we are building a windows Compact Embedded 7 app which uses VS 2008/.net 3.5.

From what I understand the mono implementation just requires .net 2.0 (which would be sufficient for us). But I do not want to use Mono, so how do I go about to build against .net 3.5 instead?

Answer 1

The best thing I have found, if I understand you correctly, is to start a new project in VS 2008, create a Form for each Form in the VS 2010 project, and start copying code from one side to the other - including the text in the designer.

Sometimes, you can get away with physically copying the files in the VS 2010 folder over to the VS 2008 folder, but VS 2010 has differences that VS 2008 doesn't always understand.

If you go this route, you will encounter many errors, but they are generally simple and quick to fix since you have the original VS 2010 code to compare to.

There may be tools out there that convert from 2010 down to 2008, but I've found the best thing to do is just copy data from one side to the other.