Channel 9 Interview: Multi-Targeting Deep Dive

Multi-targeting support in Visual Studio allows you to target your applications onto different versions of the .NET Framework. The idea is that you as the developer can move to the latest version of your development environment, Visual Studio, without having to force your users to upgrade to a new version of the .NET Framework. This has been supported since Visual Studio 2008, but have you ever wondered how we get multi-targeting to even work in Visual Studio?

Spotty Bowles, a tester on the VB compiler team, shows us the ins and outs of how multi-targeting works in Visual Basic projects in Visual Studio 2010 in this Channel 9 interview:

Channel 9 Interview: Multi-Targeting Deep Dive with Visual Basic 2010

What's tricky in Visual Studio 2010 is that there are now two supported versions of the CLR. Spotty shows us how to work with client and full framework profiles in Visual Studio, as well as what happens at runtime when referenced class libraries target a different profile. He also shows us how to use some of the new VB10 language features when down targeting to 2.0, and how to specify down targeting from the build command line.

For more information, check out Spotty's article in MSDN magazine:
Multi-Targeting Visual Basic Applications in Visual Studio

Enjoy!