Visual Studio 2011 Beta Notes

I’ve been trying to upgrade a Windows 8 Metro App project from the Developer Preview edition of Visual Studio to the Beta of 2011 for much of this morning. Not an easy upgrade path, and I haven’t been able to find much online to help so far. Here are a few notes I’ve found that may be helpful to others.

• The path on the MSBuild WindowsXaml assemblies has changed from v1.0 to v11.0. You can’t even get the project file to open until you edit this. It will kick up an error in the output window, the assembly I needed was Microsoft.Windows.UI.Xaml.CSharp.Targets.dll.
• The IGroupInfo type that used to live in the Windows.UI.Xaml.Data assembly is completely gone.
• So far as I can tell, you’re out of luck if you want to add a service reference. Any time I try to add a reference to the same WCF service that I had been using, it errors out with an extraordinarily descriptive, “Unable to add a data service. Please update project system.” I can only take that to mean a non-Metro application.

I’ll post more of these as I find them. Fun at the bleeding edge…