Has anyone managed to get Visual Studio 2003 running on Windows 7?

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

Answer 1

I have a really dirty and pathetic workaround for the pdb problem.

Download and run Sysinternals-ProceXP, press CTRL-F enter the name of pdb(smt like ($ProjectName).pdb) that can't be created while linking. Double click when it is found.(if it can't be found run procexp with administrator priviliges)

Then you will see that the .pdb file is highlighted in the lower pane of the main screen. Right click it and select Close Handle. When you retry building your solution it wont raise an error.

I dont know if this solution can be scripted but it is at least better than restarting visual studio.

Answer 2

I did managed to install VS2003 on Windows 7 32 bit. However I had to do some IIS tricks in order to be able to run my ASP.NET project. When you install VS2003 Web Development component can't be selected. Basically you have to drop your VS2003 ASP.NET v1.1 into C:\inetpub\wwwroot\project_name and make it working on it's own as a standalone web portal first. Here is the steps I did.

1. Install IIS on Windows 7

2. Copy your VS2003 project to C:\inetpub\wwwroot\project_name. Right click on your project_name and Convert to application. Following was my custom issue that didn't work until I enabled Windows Authentication even if I had no related settings in my web.config. Select your project_name > Authentication > enable both Anonymous and Windows Authentications.

3. Enable ASP.NET 1.1 in ISAPI and CGI Restrictions and make sure ASP.NET is added under ISAPI filters
4. Once I'm able to fire up my ASP.NET project in a browser go ahead and open project from your project location in my case is C:\inetpub\wwwroot\MHSScoreOrg\MHSScoreOrg.sln. I was able to run my project only when it was fully integrated on IIS.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

Give XP Mode a try if you can't get it to run natively.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx