Now that Visual Studio 2008 is available, you might wonder what will happen with the Visual Studio 2005 projects generated with the current version of the VB Upgrade Companion (VBUC). For starters, it is worth mentioning that Visual Studio 2008 fully supports projects created in the .NET Framework 2.0, like the ones generated with the VBUC. The newer version of the .NET Framework (3.0, shipped with Vista, and 3.5, shipped with VS2008) keep the same core version of the CLR (2.0) as before, with very few minor changes. There are no compatibility or breaking changes like when upgrading from versions 1.1 to 2.0 of the .NET Framework.
When you open a VS2005 project in VS2008, you are greeted with the new Visual Studio Conversion Wizard:
Once you click Next, you can select whether to create a backup of the project or not. I chose to NOT create a backup, since this is a copy of the project, since I will be comparing both .csproj files later on. Press Next.
The next step tells you what will happen during the conversion:
Press Finish, and after a little while, the process will be complete:
You can check out the Conversion Report afterwards. For most projects, however, the reports should be in blank:
So there you have it. After converting this test VS2005 Windows Form application, I was able to continue working on it without any issues. It is true that the code generated by the VBUC will not take advantage of all the neat features of the .NET Framework 3.5, such as WPF, but you should be able to continue working with the migrated code after moving to Visual Studio 2008 without any problems.