VS2008 to VS2010 Upgrade Notes

UPDATE 6/23/2010:

The issue with one of our setup project builds has been successfully resolved with a workaround that I thought didn’t work at first.  It turns out our Microsoft contact couldn’t reproduce the issue.  It was the end of the day so I decided to shelve this issue until this morning.  I tried running the setup project from my XP machine with the workaround and it worked.  More importantly, I ran it on our build machine and it worked!  The thing that threw me off was that it failed on my Windows 7 development machine, which is where I initially tested the issue.  I suspect it might have to do with the fact that the interop assemblies were actually built on my old XP development environment and that something isn’t jiving now when I use the same assemblies to build on my Windows 7 machine.  In any case, copying the interop dlls to the same path as the vdproj file works like a charm.

 

 

Using the latest and greatest development environment is always fun.  However, upgrading from a previous version isn’t always easy.  When we converted our dev environment from VS2005 to VS2008, there were a number of headaches to get everything working properly.  So far, upgrading to VS2010 from VS2008 is proving no different.  Since we’re still on TFS2008, we used this workaround to build VS2010 solutions on our Build machines. 

So after our build machines had VS2010 installed and the above MSBuildPath workaround was applied, I ran my first build.  It was a ClickOnce build and it actually ran without any issues.  The application compiled and everything got copied over to our drop location…Cool!  So then I tried running our MSI build for the same project.  I was expecting it to build fine since the ClickOnce build is a little bit more complex, but the MSI build failed.  After thoroughly checking all settings in the Setup project, I couldn’t figure out why it was failing.  The only reason in the BuildLog.txt was EXEC : error : Unable to update the dependencies of the project.  Could the message be a bit more vague, please?

After searching the web, it seemed others were having the same problem.  The workarounds suggested on that page didn’t work for us.  So instead of waiting around, we decided to open up a support ticket, which our contact at Microsoft is currently looking into.  I had a feeling that Interop assemblies in our project might be causing the problem, but it wasn’t until today that my suspicion was gaining ground.  We have a few projects that have MSI builds, so I went ahead and converted and built those out.  What do you know?  The MSI builds that don’t have Interop assemblies build fine on our build machine.  We’re still waiting for a real solution to this problem, until then, we’re building the MSI package locally for that one project.

Another one of our builds has unit tests.  I ran this project’s build without the unit tests first and it completed.  I then ran the build with the unit tests and 99.9% of the unit tests failed, but not all of them, which was weird to me.  These unit tests passed completely when we were using VS2008, so maybe the MSTest reference needed to be updated or something.  I searched MSDN and found this post about the same exact issue we were having.  I tried the solutions suggested, but they didn’t work.  There were some other odd issues with the build with the unit tests, so I just decided to delete the workspace associated with that build.  After I did this, the unit tests passed and everything looked good.

I hope when we upgrade our TFS2008 to TFS2010, that there aren’t going to be more issues.  I have my fingers crossed…