With the recent RTM release of Visual Studio 2010, I decided to give it a try. I hadn't checked out any of the Beta/CTP or RC releases as I didn't have the time. I grabbed the ISO of the RTM build from MSDN on Thursday and managed to find a few minutes to give it a whirl on Saturday. After it had installed (and being distracted by Splinter Cell: Conviction Co-op), I decided to just make sure it compiled and then come back to it later. I created a Win32 Console Hello World application and hit Build. I was presented with this error.
error TRK0002: Failed to execute command: ""C:\Program Files\Microsoft Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 R2\Bin\rc.exe" /nologo /foDebug\TestProject.exe.embed.manifest.res Debug\TestProject_manifest.rc". The handle is invalid.
I checked my VC++ Directories (in the traditional place: Tools->Options) only to find it'd been deprecated. After a bit of time with google, I did find mention that VC10 has changed some binary formats (making it less backwards compatible than previous versions - though even in the past it was always a bit of a stretch to get things working without a rebuild). I'm not sure if that was related to my problem or not, but I didn't care to investigate further. I also found mention that by default it imports all your directory settings from prior versions - in my case it picked 2008 (2005 was installed too) which would explain it picking up my older Platform SDK and some custom libraries. It seems other people were having similar issues, but their errors mentioned CL.exe rather than RC.exe.
To fix this, I followed the instructions on the help page for the VC++ Directory Property Page under To specify a per-user directory list to find the inherited search paths. The only caveat was I had to have a solution open, you can't see anything in the Property Manager without a project open. Once I had found the VC++ Directories entries, I removed the references to the older Platform SDK (I'm assuming that a newer Platform SDK would also fix this problem, but I'm just going to stick with the one that is bundled with Visual Studio 2010 for the time being). Doing this allowed my Hello World app to compile.
Otherwise, I'm liking the responsiveness of the new UI. It seems be a definite improvement. VisualSVN seems to be working without change. It doesn't appear that Visual Assist X is running (I can't see a menu bar entry for it in any case - perhaps it needs a reinstall). But regardless I'm looking forward to having a proper play with Visual Studio 2010 now that it seems to be working. I'll still be using 2005 for the bulk of my work, but I'll probably switch from 2008 to 2010 for my side projects assuming I can get all my libraries moved over.
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