VS 2005 Breaking Compatability??

[Denaes]

I hadnt heard word one about this until I was on an interview the other day.

They were looking for someone with a little 2005 experience because they have this huge project and will want to migrate to 2005.

They said it would be a terribly complicated upgrade - which I didnt quite follow. There are newer namespaces and nicer functions, but I thought this was backwards compatable. They were saying that they would have someone fixing all the breaks in the application because 2005/Net2.0 has code breaking changes.

Is this true? I thought 2.0 was new methods (like to/fromXML for a datatable), not changing the existing framework so current applications wouldnt run.

 

[PlausiblyDamp]

http://gotdotnet.com/team/changeinfo/ is probably a good starting point, the apparent plan seems (quite rightly) to keep things as close to 100% compatible as possible. Although there is a lot of new functionality that will require modifications to take advantage of (generics, nullable types, anonymous methods etc) this doesnt mean you have to use them straight away - existing code should work fine.
I do believe they have been willing to break compatability when it has been a decision between compatability and security or fixing a severe bug.
Most of the methods that are now superceded are marked as obsolete but will not prevent the application working or even being compiled against the old routines.

 

[Denaes]

Thats what I thought.

Maybe this company is using a bug as a feature or something

 

[ThePentiumGuy]

Eek. They should seriously maintain compatibility anyways. Like, they should make an addon to 2003 so that it can open 2005 projects. .NET is very expensive anyways.
I actually do not like 2005 at all - I got the beta express thing. It hides way too much from you - what the hell, why do they put the form designer generated code in a different form1.vb. They d something like:

Form1.vb <-- Public Class Form1
Form1.Partial.vb <-- Public Partial Class Form1

Really annoying if you ask me, reminds me of vb6. Completely empty form1.vb. Argh. It made so much more sense the other way around in 2003. Jeez.

And besides, with all these partial classes, the code will be pretty hard to convert backwards. Knowing microsoft, they havent even made word backward compatible.

Its all about money nowadays. Jeez.

-TPG

 

[Mister E]

You dont have to use separate files for your classes. It is just to allow you to modulate the design for a class, much like you do in C/C++.

 

[PlausiblyDamp]

Opening a 2005 project in 2003 would be potentially useless if the project used any of the newer constructs.
Splitting a class over more than one file can be a major benefit if multiple people are working on a project and need to modify the same class but in different areas (think nested classes as a way to structure a large object model).
Simply splitting off the auto-generate form code will help to prevent accidental modifaction without actually preventing deliberate changes from being made.

As to it being all about money - MS are a business and in it to make money