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.