Round-Tripping in Visual Studio 2012 RC

In all prior version of Visual Studio (Up to VS 2010),  VS2008 for example, and opened up the project(made in vs 2008) in a VS2010 in this case, VS open project convert dialog box.  If you did the conversion it was a one-way trip.  Now, you can't open the project again in VS2008 if you tried to go back.

It has been a lot of pain and suffering for developers who have to work with multiple versions(VS 2008,VS 210) of Visual Studio for a years. But the Visual Studio 2012 RC changes the game.

VS 2012 RC introduces a feature called "Project round-tripping", which has begun to make it possible for teams to work on a project in either Visual Studio 2010 or 2012.

VS 2010 SP1 included the framework for project round-tripping.

If you have projects in VS2010 SP1, many of them will load and run in VS 2012 RC without any further action on your part.

You can test it yourself by performing following step :

1. Create a project (see fine print below) in VS2010 SP1 and write little code for print "hello world
   
2. Save and close the solution.
3. Open above solution in VS 2012 RC and again write some printing statement (no longer a prompt for convert)
4. Save the close the solution.
5. Again open in VS2010 SP1. Thats called round-tripping.

Round-tripping does not work with every project type and there are some limitations based on the project type you use. For support project type please visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh266747%28VS.110%29.aspx.



Rajesh Patel
MCPD,MS
Brainbench (Asp.Net 4.0 and CSS 3.0)