Last week during the devlab at the Microsoft campus we got a nice insight that there is an open source initiative out there that enables us to work with Visual Studio 2005 and still target the “old” platform. This is really great; because one of the big problems for current .Net developers to migrate to the new platform is that they would need to upgrade their entire code base. With all the changes in the platform and the obsolete marked methods they will encounter this is many times not feasible at all. Without this wonderful solution would be stuck with the tools they have today.
Because Visual Studio 2005 compiles everything using the new MSBuild environment it is now possible to switch the target files so they would compile against the old environment. Have a look at the following location and start using Visual Studio 2005 on your current code base!