I currently use Visual Studio 2005 for all my personal projects, which means I'm also working with the .NET 2.0 framework. As one could imagine, it's getting that outdated feeling to it. I got this version of VS for free through MSDN's academic alliance program when I was in school. Now that I'm out of school, I sadly don't have access to MSDNAA so software is no longer free.
This brings us to my question. I've been eyeballing some of the new features in the current versions of .NET. Is it at all possible to upgrade VS2005 to use .NET 3.5, or is it hardwired to only work with 2.0?
Best Answer
No, you can't use VS2005 with .NET 3.5. However, you could certainly download onoe of the Visual Studio 2008 Express editions for free. That can co-exist with Visual Studio 2005 with no problem.
That's certainly what I'd go with - even if you could somehow get VS2005 to work against the 3.5 framework, you wouldn't get the language features.