In the transition from Visual Studio 2002 (which uses v1.0 of the .NET Framework) and Visual Studio 2003 (which uses v1.1. of the .NET Framework) the Microsoft Visual Studio team decided to change the project file formats so that they'd be incompatible. This means that development teams can't build .NET Framework if developers use different versions of Visual Studio that were released merely one year from each other.  

Since I use Visual Studio 2002 at home this has led to some complaints from various members of the RSS Bandit workspace who like most developers are using the latest and greatest (Visual Studio 2003) because it means the project files under source control are not compatible with their version of Visual Studio. I have been hesitant to move to Visual Studio 2003 and v1.1 of the .NET Framework because I don't want RSS Bandit to become targetted at v1.1 of the .NET Framework instead of being able to run on both v1.0 and v1.1 of the .NET Framework. Based on my web server logs, users with v1.0 of the .NET Framework installed still outnumber those with v1.1.

However it seems this is out of my hands. Last night Torsten initiated a vote in the RSS Bandit workspace and the numbers overwhelmingly indicate that the members of the workspace want to move to v1.1 of the .NET Framework. So it looks like I need to go buy a copy of Visual Studio 2003.

I now have to figure the best process to put in place to ensure that RSS Bandit always runs on both v1.0 and v1.1 of the .NET Framework. Already there is one issue I'm sure will cause breakages if I don't keep an eye on it, when people the project moves, the System.Xml.Xsl.XslTransform class had a number of overloads of its Transform() method obsoleted and replaced by new methods. When compiled against v1.1 of the .NET Framework the compiler complains that RSS Bandit uses obsoleted methods which is fine in our case since the obsoletions were a result of some overreactions during our month-long security push from last year.  However many people keep thinking that they should change the method calls to the new ones which will break RSS Bandit when it runs on v1.1 of the .NET Framework since those methods don't exist there.

Last week Torsten asked when I think we'll start to make the transition to v2.0 of the .NET Framework (no doubt inspired by all the PDC hype. From what I've seen that's going to be a bitch of a move. I suspect we won't do that till a few months after Whidbey (the next version of the .NET framework) goes gold which gives us about a year and a half.