Three Visual Studio versions

I've just received a new work machine. I'm now faced with configuring and checking functionality in 3 different versions of Visual Studio.

Visual Studio start menu entries

"Why would you need 3 versions of Visual Studio?", I hear you asking. Well, bear with me...

  • Visual Studio 2008, needed for SQL-Server Integration Services (SSIS) development on SQLServer-2008-R2. Full stop. Nothing else can be used to work on SSIS packages for that version of SQL-Server. In fact, Visual Studio 2008 masquerading as Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) installs with SQL-Server. I don't want to get started on the naming inconsistencies of these tools, that's a topic for another post. Also, Visual Studio 2008 needs a service pack and plug-in's so it can play nice with TFS-2012...another layer of complexity.

  • Visual Studio 2010, company-standard IDE for the foreseeable future.

  • Visual Studio 2012, the IDE shell had to be installed because VS-2010 couldn't delete or roll-back a file in TFS. The full version was installed later, and I tried to switch to it, but there was no syntax highlighting for tSQL (deal-breaker). At least I was able to import my VS-2010 settings, although I had to re-do any custom keyboard mappings.

Still, it's not as bad as the dark-old days when VB6 would conflict with any later versions of Visual Studio, or you couldn't remove a beta install of VS without basically re-installing the OS. It's impressive (in a way) that 3
versions of this weighty IDE can live together in harmony on one PC.
It's also rather silly that all of this is necessary.

As fiddly and arcane as vim can be, it can be a real boon when all your configuration and tweaking is encapsulated in one easily portable text file.

...Oh, hey, look! tSQL syntax highlighting has gotten fixed in VS-2012 at some point over the last few weeks. Maybe i can whittle this lot down to only two versions of Visual Studio.

09.05.2013 update, never mind...it's still 3 versions (at least for the rest of 2013).
Apparently there are conflicts when checking in changes to .sln or .proj files among different versions of Visual Studio, so i'm stuck back on VS-2012 for a while.