Version incompatibility on VS.NET 2002 vs 2003?

[Just Curious]

I am trying to learn Dot net - I downloaded a few samples from
internet and when I try to open a project, my Visual Studio 2002
complains that it is Unable to read project file because it was
created with newer version of Visual Studio.

I would think, visual studio 2002 should be backward compatible with
Visual Studio 2002 so we can save and open files across two without
problems. Am I missing something here?

Regards,

AZXML

 

[Peter Rilling]

You are talking about forward compatibility, not backward compatibility.

Very few applications are forward compatibility since there is no way to
predict what features a new version will have. Try opening a Word 2003
document in Word 1.0, simply won't work.

Having said that, Microsoft could have played nice by saving both formats in
their project files. Since the project files are only XML, they could have
easily had information for both versions.

Now, if you open a VS.NET 2002 project in VS.NET 2003, you are prompted to
update your project for the new format.