Compatibility options for Visual Studio project

Question

I'm about to be incorporated to the C# development team in my enterprise.

I've been told that currently we're developing for .NET Framework 2.0, so I must stick to VS 2005 features.

I have a MSDN subscription and I have VS 2012 installed at my home PC.

Now I'm wondering if I will have issues on opening at work stuff I've done at home or viceversa.

Someone has told me that when creating project I can select the .NET version to target, but anyway the project won't open on earlier versions of VS.

Is that true? Hasn't VS any option for setting the compatibility level of the project? And if I create the project on VS2005 and then edit it on VS2012? Wouldn't its compatibility level be respected?

Lots of thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There is a roundtripping support between VS2010 and VS2012 ie you can move back and forth between the two versions without any issues. However prior to VS2010 most projects needed to be converted/migrated to the newer version of VS and you couldn't go back to using the migrated project in the older version of VS.

In short you would not be able to keep developing on the same project in both VS2005 and VS2012 without creating two independent project files. That I do NOT recommend since it means you will be a maintain them to be in sync.