Any quick descriptions on how to go about this? Thanks!
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DLL Hell
I have question which I do not have the time to research myself, thus this post.
We have a plug-in inside of Autodesk Inventor which creates a tool bar with buttons for the user to click, which is represented as a DLL. We added a new button and the code for its functionality is actually buried in a new dll. We will be making changes frequently over the next few months and do not wish to need to recompile the tool bar code everytime we have a new version of our materials list dll.
I was under the impression that with .Net we could simply overwrite the old DLL with the new one, and as long as we don't change function names, input parameters and return types everything would work just fine.
Well no matter how many times we overwrite the file it still loads the old DLL. I had to increment the assembly and file version and he had to remove and re-add the dll as a reference in the project and recompile it to get the new DLL to be called. I plan on implementing the Auto Updater application block in this, but it won't do much good if everything needs to be recompiled. Are there any solutions to this? If I've completely botched the explanation just let me know. We're deploying this weekend so I need help!
Thanks!
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Answers
http://aspalliance.com/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/
http://www.codeproject.com
please not that reflection is used to load assemblies, not pure native DLLs
Here are quick descriptions:
1) From your plug-in dll code, you extract a Interface or create a base class which will be used in your primary application
2) Add assembly name and the class name which implements the interface or inheirts the base class in the configration file of your primary application
3) Modify your primary application code to load the assembly and instance an object of the class, cast the object to the interface or the base class type, then you call the methods.
Assembly DynamicAssembly = Assembly.Load("yourassembl
baseclassorinterfacetype toolbar = (baseclassorinterfacetype)
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by: joechinaPosted on 2006-12-29 at 19:42:01ID: 18217786
use reflection to load the dll assembly on fly with the version information in configuration file.
so you just need to redeploy the dll and update the configuration file.