Migrating to VS.NET 2005 - Lessons learned

I have been searching all over the place and talking to people regarding any issues faced during migrating the existing VS.NEt 2003 projects to VS.NET 2005. I have heard about horrifying stories, but I had not made a list still. So I venture out to Joel On Software forum and posted a question. And here are the responses from it:

1. BACKUP! Keep a backup copy.

2. If you have third party libraries, components, DLLs, whatever for your ASP stuff, check with the vendor to see if they're supported in VS2005.

3.Use Web Application Project model (as opposed to Web Site model): Consider using the Web Application Project model which is closer to the VS2003 model:http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730880(vs.80).aspx

4. Run the conversion wizard: You should probably also download the update to the Web Project Conversion Wizard: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7CECD652-FC04-4EF8-A28A-25C5006677D8&displaylang=en- or VS2005 SP1 Beta which presumably includes this as well as other hotfixes.

5. Start Early: Branch the code and start working on the conversion early since, depending on the size and complexity of your configuration, it may take a while.

6. Be XHTML compliant. Be prepared to spend some time making the pages xhtml compliant. To merge master pages with the content pages, an xslt happens, and can be problematic if they aren't xhtml compliant.For example, you can't make a
, you have to make it


7. No code on the aspx page. Because the merged page will be in a different context from the content page, code on the aspx page will give surprising results.

I will be updating this section as and when I get more information.

Disclaimer: Please do not consider as a must-do or only-to-do list. These are points I collected from different forums and friends. Please consider speaking to your Architects and Powers-to-be before making any decisions.