Errors Opening ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Sites in Visual Studio 2010 RC, Beta

If you try to use Visual Studio 2010 RC to open an existing ASP.NET MVC web site that was built on ASP.NET MVC 1.0 under Visual Studio 2008, you might expect it to be converted and to open successfully. That’s what I expected, but that did not happen. Visual Studio 2010 gave me conversion errors.

But.. there is a straight-forward way to migrate your ASP.NET MVC project from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010 RC.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Uninstall the MVC 2.0 RC (or RC 1) bits that ship with the RC if you’ve already installed Visual Studio 2010 (and you probably have if you are reading this blob post – but refer to Phil Haack’s post for full details)

2. Download the latest MVC 2.0 RC 2 bits and install them into Visual Studio 2010

3. Download the work-in-progress MVC converter tool and run it on your project

4. Open your project in Visual Studio 2010 and it will now be able to complete the conversion

One step in the conversion to Visual Studio 2010 will also ask you if you wish to convert to .NET 4.0:

Since I wish to deploy this site back to a host with .NET 3.5 SP1, I chose No. I am willing to live with deploying the ASP.NET MVC RC 2 bits, but not so with .NET 4.0 as I don’t have control over that (I deploy onto a shared server).

Presumably this will all be integrated and seamless in the final release of Visual Studio. But it worked for me…