Is Visual Studio 2013 compatible with 2010 projects?

Question

VS2012 could open up VS2010 projects and leave them in a state where they would be usable in VS2010.

Does VS2013 have the same feature?

Answer 1

Based on the table from the MSDN link, it really depends on what your project contains. Some projects are able to stay cross-version compatible while others must undergo a conversion that limit or exclude the project's version compatibility.

For example, Coded UI Test projects can be opened across all platforms but a VS 2010 project containing a tie to MVC 2 will have to be upgraded to MVC 4 to work in VS 2013. That conversion makes it only compatible with VS 2012 and VS 2013.

I'm guessing there's a set of XSDs out there that can be used to test a project file's compatibility. I couldn't locate a site with the variant XSDs and haven't thoroughly checked through the specifications, but it looks like microsoft outlines them here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/5dy88c2e(v=vs.100).aspx