As I have said many times in the past, I use VM's for development on VS2008 to keep just the latest version of Visual Studio on my 'main' machine.

I decided to update my VM to the 'Creators Edition' of Windows 10 using the insiders edition, just to check everything was OK.

The update went fine, took about 30 minutes with a couple - restarts as expected. 

I fired up VS2008 as I had a change to make for a customer on their application. Opened the project and was confronted by this message:

As I store all my source code on my ‘main’ machine, and use a mapped drive on the VM to open the projects, I assumed mapping was screwed – but that wasn’t the case.

Tried a repair on VS2008 and Compact framework – still the same.

I backed out as I really needed to make a change. I had done a backup prior to the update, so I just restored the vhdx file, and all was fine. I did the change, and released the software. 

Now that I had more time, I did the update again, opened a VS2008 project and got the same message - no surprise there.

I looked at the folder "C:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v3.5\" for the file "Microsoft.CompactFramework.CSharp.targets" and sure enough the file wasn't there. 

I have a server, which has several versions on there, including VS2008, so I took a look on there and found:-

I copied the 3 highlighted files, and copied them to my VM, started VS2008 again, and the project loaded. 

Hopefully this may help anyone still using VS2008 and Windows Mobile