Building Webparts for Sharepoint 2003 with Visual Studio 2005

Yes, it is possible!

Actually jou just have to enable Visual Studio 2005 to generate .NET 1.1 applications. There is a Microsoft-Community add-in for MSBuild that enables this: MSBuild Extras - Toolkit for .NET 1.1 "MSBee". You can download it from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/downloads/tools/msbee/default.aspx (you will get a MSI file).

Once you have installed it, this 2 steps will be enough to compile webparts for Sharepoint 2003:

[1] Open you project file with a text editor (notepad for example), and do the following (in the MSBee help file you will find the same but with a VB project):

To import an MSBee .targets file in a C# project file, find the import element for the MSBuild .targets file. For a C# project, the line you are looking for is shown below.

<Import Project="$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" />

Immediately under this line, insert the MSBee language-specific target file. For a C# project, you will want to insert the line below.

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\MSBee\MSBuildExtras.FX1_1.CSharp.targets" Condition=" '$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)' == '' AND '$(TargetFX1_1)'=='true'" />

[2] Open the Visual Studio Command and compile with MSBuild: msbuild [project file] /t:Rebuild /p:TargetFX1_1=true. This generates the binaries under bin\FX1_1\Debug (see the picture).

Maybe you will find usefull to build the solution until no errors are found and afterwards call a script that calls to MSBuild and copies the binaries to the IIS Virtual Directory (usually located at server\\c\inetpub\wwwroot\bin).

I haven't found the way to build the solution inside Visual Studio, yet. I guess it is not that easy (from the help file: "At this time, we are not planning to add IDE support."). Comments are welcome if you know how!