[Gizmo]

The conversion applies only to the project files, not the source files. That was part of what had me so aggravated with MS; they changed the project file format on their examples so that you could only open the projects with VS 2005, despite the fact that many of the examples were written back in the days of VS 5! (yes, Visual Studio 5 from like 1994 or something, NOT Visual Studio 2005) and didn't include anything that actually was specific to VS 2005.

As for VS 2003 and VS 2005 differences, MS cleaned up a lot of bugs in the VS IDE with 2005 so that a lot of things either work, or work better than they used to with VS 2003.

For myself, I am seriously considering moving to some derivative of the GNU compiler for any of the stuff that I do that is not directly related to my company work. I'm getting more fed up with the MS merry-go-round every day.