Chapter 16. Versioning

Developers as a group tend to think about only a single release at a time ”nothing exists beyond the version of the code that they are working on. As nice as this fantasy is, it usually does not fit with reality. Rare is the application or class library that does not undergo multiple revisions during its life cycle. Failing to consider how an application will grow and change over time can cause severe programming challenges further down the road. Visual Basic .NET has several features that help developers manage versioning of applications as they evolve over time.

It is important to note up front that this chapter only discusses language features that relate to application versioning and that there is much more to versioning than just what is discussed here. This chapter deals with how different versions of types work with one another, but does not get into how different versions of assemblies work with one another. The .NET Framework manages assembly versioning, so for more information on that topic, I recommend reading the excellent Essential .NET Volume 1: The Common Language Runtime , by Don Box (Addison-Wesley, 2003).