phuff34
asked on
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!
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!
ASKER
Any quick descriptions on how to go about this? Thanks!
http://aspalliance.com/815_Plug_In_Application_Using_Reflection
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dncscol/html/csharp05162002.asp?frame=true
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/SetEnumWithReflection.asp
please not that reflection is used to load assemblies, not pure native DLLs
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dncscol/html/csharp05162002.asp?frame=true
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/SetEnumWithReflection.asp
please not that reflection is used to load assemblies, not pure native DLLs
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so you just need to redeploy the dll and update the configuration file.