Has anyone managed to get Visual Studio 2003 runni

Question

Yes, I know... I could set up a virtual machine running XP. Unfortunately our build environment is such that we need to be running VC2003, 2005 and 2008 concurrently and it would be much more convenient if I could run 2003 natively on Windows 7 for the few projects we have that require it.

I realize some things may not be available in the IDE, but I was able to run 2003 under windows Vista and if I could get the same base level of functionality under Windows 7 I would be extremely happy.

Right now I get an error opening the *.pdb file when I compile after switching vc2003 to run as Administrator under compatibility mode for XP SP 2.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I got Visual Studio .NET 2003 Working just fine on my HP EliteBook Workstation 8760W with an I7 processor and 12GB of RAM running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit by doing some advanced steps. They go as follows:

1. Install FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions for IIS 7.0.
2. Install Visual Studio .Net 2003. Just skip when the installer command you to configure Frontpage 2002 Server Extensions.
3. Install .Net Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 (download here).
4. Go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. Highlight your machine, then double-click on ISAPI and CGI Restrictions. Change setting for ASP .NET v1.1.4322 to Allowed.

Then it will always show an alert with the following message

This program has compatibility issues...

just ignore that. Also, don't put it in compatibility mode in the properties of the IDE.

Answer 2

In windows 7, there is the compatabiliy mode in the executable properties. open:C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\IDE\ then right click on the devenv.exe and select properties. In the compatability tab, select the "Run in compatability mode" and select "Windows XP" in the dropdown.

Try that, I am not sure if it works, but it is worth a shot.

Answer 3

Have you considered upgrading your solutions to vs2005, using MSBEE to target .net 1.1?

Answer 4

(Much of this repeats what's already been written above.)

I need to run VS2003 as adminstrator under Win7 64-bit, to support legacy projects (e.g. those that run on the original Xbox). The old XDK requires VS2003, so upgrading is not an option. I could run WinXP but I prefer Win7.

VS2003 is not officially supported under Win7 and trying to do so creates a couple of fairly annoying problems:

Find-in-files causes VS2003 to hang. Linking fails due to a PDB file handle leak. The Find-in-files hang is solved by using "Disable visual themes". Navigate to the VS2003 shortcut (Start-->Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003), right-click to get context menu, select Compatibility tab, Settings pane, and check "Disable visual themes".

The linker failure (LNK1201) happens when you run the program through the debugger, stop it, modify a file and build. The error is that a Visual Studio hold a handle to the PDB file, while the linker tries to write to that file. You can stop and restart VS2003 to bypass the issue. Works but is annoying.

You can also use the Microsoft SysInternals "handle.exe" utility to find, then close handles held by a process on a particular file. Write a script to call handle.exe and set up the VS2003 project to run that script as a Pre-Build Event. (See this thread.) But handle.exe requires running as admin.

You could hypothetically change handle.exe to run as admin using the usual steps (e.g. as a compatibility setting) but then handle.exe (apparently) runs in a nested shell, and then the stdout text does not get to the calling script.

You can make VS2003 run as admin, in which case the Pre-Build script also runs as admin, hence does handle.exe, and that works.

The remaining trick is to get VS2003 SLN files to open properly. If you simply make VS2003 run as admin automatically then the VS version selector fails to run VS2003. I don't know why, but it is the case.

You could associate SLN files to open using VS2003 devenv.exe instead of VSLauncher.exe. That works but then all new SLN files (2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, ...) fail to open.

So the final step then is to make VSLauncher.exe run as admin. This fails as of KB2492386 as this thread indicates. Uninstalling that update was the final step in this saga, to get everything to work.

Answer 5

Run this install. You need to run it from the setup directory, the setup.exe on the root of the cd will not work.

D:\setup\SetUp.exe /NO_BSLN_CHECK

Answer 6

I wrote a blog entry about this a while back that you can check out - http://technikhil.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/visual-studio-2003-and-windows-7-can-get-along-really/

The only thing I am stuck on right now is the global search functionality of VS 2003 - it hangs the application. My workaround is to use windows 7 search :-). Other than that - so far so good...

Update: I got the search to work as well by disabling the Aero functionality - I have updated my blog post with the details...