Hacker News Reader

Nope. MSBUILD and all the new compilers ship with the Windows 7.1 SDK:

http://blogs.msdn.com/windowssdk/archive/2010/04/07/coming-s...

Good question. Are you asking if you can target .NET 4.0 with VS 2008? I don't know, my experience has been that it's like swimming upstream to try to separate the IDE, .NET Framework version, and language version -- best to just get them all.

Are you asking if you can target .NET 4.0 with VS 2008?

Highly unlikely. However, VS2010 will give you a choice of Runtime versions from 4 downwards. VS2008 will give you a choice of Runtime versions from 3.5 downwards.

Probably doesn't support fancy stuff like that just yet, but I've found SharpDevelop ( http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/ ) quite nice.

C# is compiled using msbuild which is distributed with the .NET framework. So you don't need any VS at all to compile .csproj