Speeding up Visual Studio 2008 with Resharper

You already got what you are asking for. With that much RAM, you'll have a really big file system cache. Visible from Taskmgr.exe, Performance tab, Cached. Any disk writes that Visual Studio performs will completely instantaneously as data gets written to RAM. The cache manager will then lazily write it to disk, making your drive access light blink in the process of course.

Similarly, disk reads will speed up. It still has to come off the disk but it will read an entire track instead of just the file sector that Visual Studio asks for. Making it very likely that the next read will come out of RAM instead of having to be retrieved from the disk.

This works so well (and is secure) that RAM disks are no longer used.

You have always been able to install different versions of Visual Studio side by side since before version 2008 so you should be able to have them all installed at the same time (assuming that they all install of course!).

Visual Studio 2012 will install, obviously, as that's what you use to build Windows 8 applications.

This post is asking about a problem with a program built with Visual Studio 2008 installed on Windows 8

I have set up VS2008 on Win8 and now debugging how it works.

So it clearly can be installed.

As Visual Studio 2008 can be installed I would expect Visual Studio 2010 can be as well.

However, why do you need to have all three versions? Visual Studio can target earlier versions of .NET so unless you are sharing your projects with others who have to use these earlier versions or have to use features that are no longer supported (Windows phone 6.x projects for example), you could just install 2012.