Rob Catterall wrote: Would you suggest that it is worthwhile upgrading from Visual Studio 6 (we have an MSDN subscription so I already have the software)? Yes. While VS.NET has significant differences in the IDE from VC6, for the most part the changes are worthwhile. A number of editor functions that you used to have to write macros for are now provided directly. Speaking of which, if you use macros a lot, you're going to be really pissed off. Any macros you had from VC6 will have to be rewritten, since the IDE object model is completely different. Also, VS.NET 2002 had some bugs in the resource editors, which supposedly 2003 has corrected. We're at the tail end of a development cycle, so we haven't upgraded to 2003 yet, and I have no direct experience. Rob Catterall wrote: Can I continue to maintain VisualC++ 6 projects under vs.net Sort of. VC6 projects will import directly into VS.NET and can be recompiled with little or no changes. The compiler may issue a few warnings about features that have been deprecated, but those are easily fixed usually. But. Projects that have been upgraded to VS.NET cannot be easily downgraded to VC6. There was a tool here on Code Project at one time to do just that. The other, more significant, concern is that projects compiled under VS.NET require the VS.NET versions of the C++ runtime and MFC DLL's to be loaded onto the target machine, and those DLL's aren't installed unless you put them there. The VC6 DLL's were included in the OS install. Rob Catterall wrote: can 6 and .net be installed on the same machine safely? Yes. I recommend installing things in the following order: VC6, MSDN Library October 2001 (the last version that integrated with VC6), VS.NET, and the latest MSDN Library. Software Zen: delete this;