One thing Microsoft is generally good about is keeping old applications running. Applications built with Visual Basic 6.0 (first released in 1998) still run well (in most cases) on the latest Windows.

I maintain an application which is not quite that old, but which was built with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 2.0. It still runs but needs modernizing and taking cross-platform.

I tried opening the project in Visual Studio 2026 but the automatic project conversion failed and it was proving difficult to fix up. Maybe it would be easier to keep it as-is and import it piecemeal to a new project, converting the database from Access MDB to SQLite along the way.

To this end, I decided to install Visual Studio 2008 on Windows 11. One can still download the trial from Microsoft as this Stack Overflow thread discusses, and upgrade to full if you have a valid key. I had to disable Windows 11 Smart App Control in order to mount the .iso files.

I installed both VS 2008 and the SP1 patch, as well as the MSDN library. Remarkably everything worked smoothly, with the exception of SQL Server 2005 (installed by default) which Windows warns will not work correctly.

My project loads and runs perfectly and the old Visual Studio is delightfully responsive to use.

One of the first things I did was to write code to export the MDB to SQLite, an important step forward in the modernization journey, and the task was completed in less than a day.