The last weeks my project which is 30 developers large, with an extensive continuous integration setup and a automated deployment, has experienced the joy of upgrading visual studio to 2008 sp1. With the size and complexity of our setup, I think we might have hit just about every bug and unpredictable changes in the upgrade process. Just to mention a few ingrediences, we use mstest, clickOnce, msbuild, team foundation server with extensive automation and customization (integration with nant scripts and the TFS api), web services, windows services, web applications, win forms applications, wpf applications, ssis projects, reporting services projects, sql server clr projects, message queueing, etc.
We have not upgraded sql server to 2008, and we probably will not in the forseen future, so we have to live with sql server 2005.
I thought I'd write a few articles about what quirks we had to circumvent before we were successful (more or less), so that others might have a smoother upgrade. The issues I will go through are:
- MStest, problems with converting mstest projects, and mstest 8.0 vs mstest 9.0
- clickonce, manifest problems
- al.exe missing
- tf.exe and missing workspaces
- new targets (.net 2.0,3.0 and 3.5), and references to 3.0 assemblies.
- resx files that misses code behind
- ssis projects and reporting services projects.
So stay tuned for the gory details.