Convert VS 11 Beta Metro Projects To VS 2012 RC

Over the last months I’ve worked a lot with Windows 8 Metro applications, from Consumer Preview to Preview 2 and now to RC.

When working on Beta versions you know that you have to upgrade your app when RC or RTM versions will published, and sometime those upgrades can take a while…

So this is the first part of upgrading your Project from Visual Studio 11 Beta to Visual Studio 2012 RC, in my next post I’ll talk about code Changes from Beta to RC both for C# and JavaScript.

JavaScript

For JavaScript project this is pretty easy, just open the solution and change the WinRT version from 0.6 to 1.0.RC

But if you have several projects you created in Consumer Preview you might want to go this way:

I’ve download a “Find & Replace” tool (DivlocSoft - File Find and Replace Software) allowing me to Search inside file content and replace – so you need to search for:

<SDKReference Include="Microsoft.WinJS, Version=0.6" />

and Replace with:

<SDKReference Include="Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC, Version=1.0" />

same goes here, both Html and JavaScript files that have reference you should search for:

//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/

and Replace with:

//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/

C#

Nothing hard to do for converting the project to RC, this is because in C# projects a reference to the entire .Net Framework and Windows SDK are automatically included.

This is just for upgrading the Project, for C# there is no chance your project will run, there is too many changes and I’ll talk about them in my next post.