Using VS 2008 and VS 2005 on the Same Computer
There has been some discussion about using Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005 with speech server on the same box. I thought I would write about my experiences and provide some warnings and alternatives.
I personally have loaded both VS 2008 and VS 2005 on an XP Pro box and things seem to be OK with one exception... It seems there was a slight change in the way the workflow activities work. Now, whenever a required property is needed on an activity, and in some cases even when things should not indicate requirements, instead of displaying a red exclamation mark, there is a red X through the entire activity icon box.
As long as there is a red X, it appears as though you cannot select the activity. However when you do click or right-click on the activity everything seems to work as it should. The only thing you can't do is delete the activty unless you minimize it by clicking the double chevron button. This is more of an annoyance than anything else. I can still write and debug speech apps.
Using Vista is a whole other issue. A colleague of mine installed VS 2008 on the same box as VS 2005 and speech server. When he tried running an app within Visual Studios, there was an error indicating that the debugger could not attach to the workflow process. Even when he tried using the CTRL-F5 (non debug mode) he got the same error.
So the bottom line is I would not recommend doing loading VS 2008 with VS 2005 if you are working on speech apps, especially on Vista. With XP Pro, things seem to work OK but with the caveat I mentioned above. There may be some other issues I have not uncovered yet.
My suggestion would be to create a virtual machine and load VS 2008 on the virtual machine if you need to work on VS 2008 and VS 2005 on the same box.