Manage tooling with different Civil3D versions

[gleeuwdrent]

Does anyone has a best practice how to manage .NET tooling with different Civil3D versions? I have a Visual Studio project with a lot of tools, and I want to make the tooling available for different Civil3D versions (2018, 2019. 2020). But you can't reference to the libraries of different versions in the same project. Is there a way to manage this without copy the whole project and re-reference the libraries? Because then you have to manage the full project multiple times.

Thanks in advance!

[465340553 · Accepted solution]

Create multi projects in one solution，

Manage files in one project,

In other projects,

Add File As Link。

When code is modified in the first project,

All projects will synchronization update。

[Jeff_M · Accepted solution]

As long as you aren't using the COM API, you should be able to compile in an older release and still be able to use it in newer versions.

I have many tools, some of which still require COM, so all I do is copy the *.csproj file, edit the references using Notepad (search and replace 2020 to 2021), save then load that project. It still uses all the same code.

My Solution actually has 5 different Projects, so I do the same for each project as well as the Solution. Takes maybe 5 minutes to do this each year.

[gleeuwdrent]

Thanks, I wasn't aware of the linked files option in Visual Studio. Very useful.

Other solution of Jeff also appreciated.