Suppose we have a .vcproj that is created with Visual Studio 2005 but only VS2003 is installed on our systems. When we try to open it  in 2003, it will not open and a error message will be displayed.

However, we can open it 2003 just by changing ‘Version’ in .vcproj and here is how :

1. Open .vcproj in wordpad. It looks like below…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?>
<VisualStudioProject
    ProjectType="Visual C++"
    Version="8.00"

2. Change the Version from 8.00 to 7.10. Now it looks like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?>
<VisualStudioProject
    ProjectType="Visual C++"
    Version="7.10"

3. Save it.

And open it in 2003. It opens now.

I observed that this technique works in most instances.