As most software developers understand moving from v1 of a product to v2 causes all manner of grief. In particular it is usually the first time that you think about how you are going to version your product. I don’t mean just giving it a version, I mean how you are going to upgrade v1 users, how you are going to increment version numbers etc.
I was talking to Bill last week about v2 of the Device Emulator. This was originally incorporated into Visual Studio as part of the extensions for device developers but since [VS2005] it has been available as a standalone emulator that can be used for demos, testing etc. Bill wanted to know whether installing the standalone version overwrote the version which gets deployed with Visual Studio. For the record the answer is yes it does but this is definitely not evident from looking at the file system:
- Firstly, to ensure that v2 does infact replace the version that Visual Studio launches it is installed into the same location on the file system (namely: C:Program FilesMicrosoft Device Emulator1.0)
- The file version (which is also the version reported in the About dialog) is 8.0.60801.0
Clearly there wasn’t much thinking about versioning when the team were planning this one?