Upgrading Amicus POS from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008 Part 3.

This week, we continue with the cutover to Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5.

One thing that surprised me was that even though I checked the ‘convert projects to .NET 3.5’ option, the projects were still set to .NET 2.0. Regardless of whether this was a VS bug, or me not paying close attention, the result was that I had to go through each project and select the target deployment to be .Net 3.5. For the number of projects we have, that was painful.

There were several issues in getting Amicus PDA to compile. There are many external libraries with this product, which makes it hard to ensure they are all up-to-date with .NET 3.5. Even now, I’m not 100% sure it was cut over successfully. But we will soon see, as it needs to be ready by the end of the month.

We were finally at the point where we could compile Amicus on the build server using .NET 3.5. The next task was to ensure that Amicus shipped with the correct set of redistributables. The VS 2008 SP1 C++ redistributables worked fine. In fact, we fixed a bug where the UID used to check if the old redistributables we installed were wrong. The new one now works fine.

The problem with the redistributables was mainly .NET 3.5. The .NET 2.0 framework installer was only about 23MB. However the .NET 3.5 SP1 framework installer was around 230MB. If we included that, it would blow out the size of an Amicus install dramatically. Another option was to simply include the bootstrapper instead. This was only about 3MB, and simply allowed the client to download the full 230MB version themselves. This decreased the size of the release, but made it harder to install at the client site.

An option we investigated was the Client Profile. This is a cut down version of .NET 3.5, which only included common Windows based libraries. However, to use this, you need to choose that as the target platform in the project options when compiling. As soon as we tried that, it started warning that we were using libraries that needed the full .NET 3.5.

So, the final result was to use the bootstrapper so that we could cut down the size of the release. None of the options were appealing, but this was the final choice.