How do you manage a project branch when 3rd party library versionschange?

[Uri Dor]

Hi,
I'm developing a WinForms C# 1.1 application and am reaching a point at
which my code may face a branch - let's say version 1.1 is released to
end users and we'll continue to fix bugs, but version 1.2 is being
developed.
Now let's say that I decide to upgrade a 3rd party component library I'm
using (I currently use Infragistics, Janus GridEx and Syncfusion
ExcelRW) - will I be able to build version 1.1 with its matching
components and version 1.2 with its matching components (different
versions) on the same build computer configuration?
Where do the assemblies for compilation come from ? The GAC on my build
machine ? I remember playing with this and directly referencing by path
to DLLs that were also installed in the GAC and getting warnings.

Regards
Uri

[Frans Bouma [C# MVP]]

Uri Dor wrote:

Hi,
I'm developing a WinForms C# 1.1 application and am reaching a point
at which my code may face a branch - let's say version 1.1 is
released to end users and we'll continue to fix bugs, but version 1.2
is being developed. Now let's say that I decide to upgrade a 3rd
party component library I'm using (I currently use Infragistics,
Janus GridEx and Syncfusion ExcelRW) - will I be able to build
version 1.1 with its matching components and version 1.2 with its
matching components (different versions) on the same build computer
configuration? Where do the assemblies for compilation come from ?

Often these control vendors uninstall older versions first, if I'm not
mistaken Infragistics does this (and creates a backup folder) and
install newer versions into the GAC.

There's nothing wrong with keeping the assemblies locally to your
project. So create a folder for the 1.1 application and put in there
all assemblies it currently needs. Eventually, store this in source
control as well, or at least be sure you can re-build that folder from
a backup. Then build your 1.1 version with those assemblies and build
1.2 with the newer versions.

I'm not sure how old the infragistics assemblies are you're using, my
experience with 2004.1 is that locally copied assemblies from them
didn't play nice, but required that they were loaded from the gac,
could be some assembly wasn't reachable though didn't get an error,
just weird rendering.

FB

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