Upgrading a project from VS2010 and earlier to a project VS2012 and later

If you have an INtime project developed with a version of Visual Studio older than 2012 and you want to upgrade it, you may encounter various problems. This article helps you overcome these problems. In the remainder of this article we abbreviate Visual Studio to VS.

Upgrade the project

To upgrade a VS solution with one or more INtime projects, open the solution file (with extension .SLN) with VS2012, VS2013 or a later version. Visual Studio will tell you that an upgrade is required and, after doing that, shows a page of remarks, warnings and errors. You can ignore those. Note that the project no longer consists of an .INTP file and a .VCPROJ file but consists of a single .VCXPROJ file. In Solution Explorer an INtime project is now represented by a single C/C++ project icon instead of the INtime icon that contains a C/C++ project.

VS then opens the solution and contained projects and that may cause one or more of the following problems. The files with extension vcproj get converted into vcxproj. Thus the .vcproj as well as the .intp can be removed.

Project load failed

When next to a project name in VS's Solution Explorer you see the text "(load failed)", there is a property in the project that VS does not understand. You have to open the project file in a text editor and correct this.

Right click the project name, select "Edit xxx.vcxproj" and the file contents appear. If this does not work, close the solution and open the file xxx.vcxproj where xxx is the project name (note the x in the file extension).

In the text editor, find the line containing "OwnerKey". That part of the file looks like:

  <PropertyGroup Label="Globals">
    ...
    <OwnerKey>{D987F051-CB2C-4081-A03B-E8D10A4A0B36}</OwnerKey>
    ...
  </PropertyGroup>

Delete the text from "<OwnerKey" up to and including "</OwnerKey>". If the PropertyGroup element is now empty, you can delete the text from "<PropertyGroup" up to and including "</PropertyGroup>".

Save the file, close the text editor and if you had closed the solution, open it again in VS.

Again right click the project and now select "Reload project". If that fails, close the solution and open it again. If the project still fails to load, you should proceed with the next step".

Platform name is still "win32"

To be able to build proper INtime executable files, the platform needs to be set to "INtime".  If VS still shows "win32" for the platform, this needs to be changed by hand.

Close the solution. Open the .SLN file in a text editor. Replace every occurrence of the word "win32" as a platform by "INtime". Save the file.

Repeat the last step for each project by editing the xxx.vcxproj file, where xxx is the project name. Be sure to edit the vcxproj and not the vcproj files.

Open the solution again in VS.

Try to build

Some of the intermediate files may still exist in an old format, so you have to do a full rebuild: Build / Rebuild or Ctrl-Shift-B. If the build is OK, you are done. If the build fails, try to fix the causes.  If that works, you are done.

If it still fails

Try the techniques in the next section.

Upgrading a C++ project to a later version of Visual Studio

Because of the spceific settings for each version of C++, it is recommended to create a new empty C++ project in the new version of Visual Studio then add the source files from the previous project. If the presvious project contained a *.vcxproj.filters file, copy that to the new project to make it easier to add the files. Adjust the project settings to include any custom settings from the previous project.