Hey all,
This is a philosophical topic, so bear with me here. Wonder if anybody has thought this through...
I have built a couple of Interop DLLs that I ship with my VFP applications to provide some additional functionliaty. There are a number of things I'm worried about:
Installation
.NET assemblies compiled for COM interop can't be registered traditionally - they require the use of the RegAsm.exe utility (or a custom EXE that uses the .NET registration services).
How would one handle this from an installer like InstallShield? I think this is not possible and requires post installation steps on the application's first start?
Versioning
This is the big issue: What happens if .NET is rev'd and a new version is installed, but the old one that hte DLL was compiled in is not?
Is there some way that a DLL can be compiled so that it will be forward compatible with newer .NET versions and can be registered by RegAsm? I realize there are some ways to do this for applications by using a configuration file, but I don't think this works for components.
Any comments?