It’s about two month that I’m working on the new version of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. The new version of .NET has some cool features that you can use in order to develop your applications much better but what I’m going to write about today is the way that you can use in order to develop you .NET 3.5 or older on the Visual Studio IDE. Upgrading to the new version of .NET is sort of risky because not many web hosts support .NET 4 and the main reason is, .NET 4 is still beta! But it doesn’t mean that you cannot use the new IDE! You can easily set the “Target Framework” to 3.5 or even 2 if you’re not going to upgrade to .NET 4. In order to do this, you can follow these steps:

• Open your project in the Visual Studio 2010 by click File -> Open Project. When you select your specified solution, the following window will be showing up:
  
• Click Finish and now you can see your project’s files in the VS2010’s Solution Explorer.
• Right-Click on the solution and select properties.
• In properties window, select Application tab and you can see the Target Framework DropDownList:
  
• As you can see in the picture above, you can select any framework that you’ve installed on your machine or you can install additional frameworks by select “Install other Frameworks” item.

Now you can develop your .NET 3.5 or older versions on the VS2010 IDE. By the way, in the next post, I’m going to write about Visual Studio IDE.

Hope it helps.