Can I use Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 instead of 2008?

VS  2010 is unlikely to work.

No  official experiments has been done for VS 2010 and InDesign code base. An experiment was done a few days back, mostly to check out VS 2010’s  new code completion features, but ran into problems with the first two major  projects (PMRuntime and Public).

• PMRuntime  needs to be upgraded whenever the base C runtime libs change, and these will  change when we switch to VS 2010. Also PMRuntime project internally builds the  mem track version of PMRuntime using VCBuild, which has been replaced by  MSBuild, so project changes are also needed.

• In  case of Public, our version of Boost does not recognize VS 2010 as a valid  compiler, which is the probable cause of compilation errors in Boost related  calls.
• Also,  some lines in one of the xcconfig files had to be reordered because variables  like ID_SDK_DIR need to be defined before usage in VS 2010.

In  response to this, an SDK like environment was set up by extracting the SDK  libs and tried to build BasicDialog:

-       -  Project  settings need to be changed (VS 2010 requires better coordination between  settings in the General panel and the settings in the Linker panel with respect  to project output dir, target name and extension)

-       -  An  error reported by mergesres.cmd effectively cancels the build.  &  An  Unknown compiler version warning (from Boost) occurs during the compilation, but  the code does compile.

The first two issues has been fixed and the project did build successfully. Once InDesign with the newly compiled BasicDialog plugin was launched, the following  system error occurred, the  BasicDialog plugin failed to load:

Conclusion: users will need to use VS 2008 only