Upgrading Amicus POS from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008.

This week we have been cutting over the trunk of Amicus to use Visual Studio 2008. Something we’ve wanted to do for a while. Since becoming Microsoft Certified Partners, this has been made more achievable as we now have the licences we need.

There were several solutions in the Amicus point of sale software that needed to be cut over. Several of these share projects between them. So opening the solutions and upgrading them was relatively easy. From this phase there were 3 main warnings that came with the new version of Visual Studio:

• Wp64 compiler option is deprecated. This is the option used to tell the compiler to check for 64 bit compatibility. I find it strange that this option is deprecated, as I would have thought it to be useful. I expect that they have either found a way to get around the problems this warning was warning against, or they will eventually just warn you anyway.
• The header file is no longer supported. A quick search on the Internet revealed that this is no longer supported by Microsoft. Instead, they released the source for this as an open source project, and are letting the open source community deal with it. This meant that I had to download the open source version, and include it manually.
• Old style CLR syntax is deprecated. At first, I wasn’t sure what this meant, as I didn’t know such a thing existed. Also, I didn’t think we used it. When I looked closer, I realised it was from code that was generated for us. The original code was created years ago from Visual Studio 2003, so that would explain why the old syntax was used.