Hi,

Is it possible to have 2 version of SF in same development machine? How?



Thank you

Hi,

I think the only way is through a Virtual PC with one version licenced at a time.

Aaron

At present, no.  At least not to develop on at the same time.  In the future, we will change SF to allow you to run, and develop, on multiple versions at the same time.  The issue comes with the design-time components within VS.  But for now, you can still have multiple version of SF on the machine, especially if not stored within the GAC.  So you may consider having only the newer SF assemblies in the GAC on which to develop and pull out the older ones.  This way you can at least have the older assemblies referenced in your source and build, run, debug, etc.

A virtual machine is also a good idea, like Aaron mentioned.

We are increasingly finding ourselves needing to be able to move between versions of SF. For new development, of course, we want to use the latest and greatest release, but we don't always have time to regression test and upgrade other applications and we are usually working on different projects and can't always co-ordinate or synchronize our dev upgrades.



We have several production custom apps both desktop and web for various clients. In fact, one of our clients is a manufacturer of health care products and due to FDA regulations ANY change to the source regardless if its application specific or framework requires running through their complete test plans and signing off.



I've thought about using Virtual PC, but the horsepower needed, etc. to do VS development and use other apps at the same time is a bit more than we have right now.



So, what we'd like to do is figure out a quick simple way to quickly upgrade/downgrade the design time DLLS and VS extensions, not just our referenced libraries in the projects but also the VS design time without going through full install/uninstall. Is this possible?



Also, if we can feasibly do this, would you recommend keeping versioned Strataframe databases or are the changes made to this database backward compatible.



Any help is greatly appreciated.



Thanks,

Randy

First, this is something that we plan to overhaul in the future. We will most likely have different signatures for each update. This will allow you to install more than one version of SF at a time. We will also most likely change assembly names as well to ease this also. The major change will have to occur design-time so that more than one version can be used at a time. So this will have to support multiple versions of the BO Mapper, etc.







At present, if you just need to support multiple versions, you can have more than a single SF version in the GAC which will give you all of the capabilities to maintain each version as well as build and use type editors. The downside is that the SF BO Mapper could potentially cause a problem since this changes (even if minor) between some SF versions.







If you are going to need to retain the ability to use the BO Mapper, etc. then yes, this is probably a good idea. Like I said, these are all issues that we intend to address long-term, but at present, you will have to take an approach like this.

As part of these enhancements are you also still planning on moving the SF meta data from a database to something that lives in the solution folder? I think that was what you've mentioned before, so the data used by the BO mapper, localization etc. would be more portable, manageable by source control and more resilient to versions change issues. Am I remembering this correctly?

Hi Trent, thanks for the replies. I think we can put together a short term strategy based on this.



Looking forward to the longer term enhancements related to this. I think this is just an issue inherent to working with frameworks and multi-developer/multi-clients in general. We have similar issues with some of the VFP frameworks and tools we use and it really just requires a good game plan and communication.

Yup, you got it. This will require some time so that is why it has not happened yet. The change that Randy is wanting will take place when this happens. Good memory!

Thanks for the confirmation. Good to hear. I'm hoping this happens fairly soon, as these are both pain points for me, also.

Hi

May I know if this request has been implemented?