Richard Banks posted about a registry key for just such a tweak.
Visual Studio 2012 (Full)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General
DWORD: SuppressUppercaseConversion
Value: 1
In PowerShell, you can run this to set that registry key and the uppercase goes away.
Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1
Visual Studio Express 2012
The above registry key is not the one that will affect Visual Studio Express 2012 RC. A comment by FormatC showed up on Banks post about the key for Express. You can find that key mentioned in Mike Gleason's answer or run the following PowerShell command to set it.
Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\VSWinExpress\11.0\General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1
Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web
Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\VWDExpress\11.0\General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1
Visual Studio 2013
Replace 11.0
with 12.0
in the registry keys above.
Visual Studio 2015 Developer Preview
Replace 11.0
with 14.0
in the registry keys above.
Opening an unsupported MVC project in Visual Studio 2012 or Visual Studio 2013 is actually pretty easy to accomplish with two steps. In fact, as bytebender’s comment indicates, these same steps should apply to and work for MVC 1 projects. However, I haven’t tested them and therefore cannot guarantee that they do in fact work.
Assuming that you have not already done so step one is to download and install MVC 1, MVC 2 or MVC 3 (close Visual Studio before starting the installation).
Once you have the appropriate flavor of MVC installed the project will still not load in VS 2012. This is because ASP.NET MVC projects are a project subtype of the Web Application project type. This means that the project has additional add ins and features available to it when used within Visual Studio.
Both Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013 are limited in their backwards compatibility with ASP.NET MVC and other project types. Unfortunately, installing the old MVC bits did not change that. Visual Studio 2012 is compatible with the ASP.NET MVC 3 and 4 project flavors. Visual Studio 2013 is compatible with MVC 4 and MVC 5.
To get the project to load you will have to modify the project file. To do so right click on the unloaded project and select Edit. Which will open the project file as an XML text file. Find the ProjectTypeGuids
node which should look something like this:
<ProjectTypeGuids>
{F85E285D-A4E0-4152-9332-AB1D724D3325};{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}
</ProjectTypeGuids>
Remove the appropriate Project Guid from the list:
- ASP.NET MVC 1:
{603c0e0b-db56-11dc-be95-000d561079b0}
- ASP.NET MVC 2:
{F85E285D-A4E0-4152-9332-AB1D724D3325}
(shown in example above)
- ASP.NET MVC 3:
{E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401}
- ASP.NET MVC 4:
{E3E379DF-F4C6-4180-9B81-6769533ABE47}
With the appropriate GUID removed the ProjectTypeGuids
should look similar to this:
<ProjectTypeGuids>
{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}
</ProjectTypeGuids>
Save the file and close the Visual Studio project file editor. Right click the project and select reload. If the project does not reload close and reopen Visual Studio. You should now be able to work with your old ASP.NET MVC project in your new version of Visual Studio.
One important thing to note is that after these modifications Visual Studio is not aware that this is an ASP.NET MVC project; therefore the project-specific features like "Add Controller, View etc." will not be present in menus.
Best Answer
Update 2013-12-02: WiX Toolset 3.8 is released with official support for Visual Studio 2013 editions. It is available for download from wixtoolset.org.
You can manually enable Visual Studio 2013 compatibility with older versions of WiX:
Copy
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\WiX
toC:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\WiX
Modify
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\WiX\extension.vsixmanifest
by adding the following:Then open VS2013 Native Tools Command Prompt (from
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\Tools\Shortcuts
) and execute:When you open Visual Studio 2013, WiX 3.7 projects will be compatible.