Visual Studio 2003 And Find In Files Under Vista

It's probably widely known by now that Microsoft do not support Visual Studio 2003 under Windows Vista (and 7).

I still have to support a legacy application that was produced with VS2003, so decided to give it a go anyway. To my surprise everthing in the winforms application that I needed basically worked, including debugging, intellsense and so on.

Everything that is until I tried to use 'Find in Files', which promptly crashed Visual Studio.

The Fix

Until that happened, I didn't realise that I use this feature so much, but there is a relatively straight forward fix; by editing the compatibility settings of Visual Studio 2003 and adjusting the following:

  • Run program in compatibility mode for XP SP2
  • Disable Visual Themes
  • Disable Desktop Composition

Alternatively you could go use Visual Basic 6, which is supported by Microsoft under Vista.

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