how to specify .net framework version

Question

Hello gracious and knowledgable C# professionals.

I have a question about the .net framework and VS2005. I would like to install the SqlServer 2008 client tools on my machine and they require .net framework 3.5. At the same time I will be doing some novice development against the .net 2.0 framework. My question is: if I upgrade to .net 3.5 and create a new Visual C# project in VS2005, is there a way to specify the framework version assemblies that the project will use? In other words, how do I force VS2005 to ignore the .net 3.5 framework?

Thanks a bunch.

Alan · Answer

Yes that shouldn't be a problem as .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5 both use the same version of the CLR (v2.0).

Jason · Answer

That's good news. Many thanks. On a side note one should be able to create references to dlls in 3.5 as long as they were compiled with the 2.0 compiler right? I don't anticipate having to do so but I thought I'd ask. Thanks again.

Alan · Answer

Visual Studio 2005 will automatically use .NET 2.0 - it can't use .NET 3.5. Visual Studio 2008 will automatically use .NET 3.5 - though it can be configured to target versions 2.0 or 3.0 instead. Both versions of VS and all versions of the framework can happily co-exist on the same system. So in other words you don't have a problem :)