Is there a way to target .net 4 for an Inventor 2012 add-in?

[Anonymous]

We have a large code base that is migrated to .net 4. I did not find an easy way to target .net 4 when writing an add-in for Inventor 2012.

Is there a solution to this?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hello,

It seems like I was able to do this once using a "registry-based" addin.  I know it's a step back since we're told to use "registry-free" addins in Inventor 2012 foward, but I think this works.  Can you try that and let us know?

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

Thank you for this idea, maybe someone from Adesk can chime in and confirm if this is a possibility in theory?

My gut feeling tells me that the problem with the Adesk 3.5 file needing to reference my 4.0 dlls might remain.

[adam.nagy · Accepted solution]

Hi Johan,

Yes, what Farren said seems to work. I assume because of the Side by Side execution feature of .NET 4: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/arik/archive/2011/05/30/how-to-use-a-net-4-based-dll-from-net-2-b...

Actually, I thought that the Reg-Free version could work as well, but I did not manage to achieve that.

Another thing you can do is force Inventor to use the .NET 4 Framework. This seems to work fine, but still it is unsupported, so if you run into any problems with it then we cannot help.

In order to do that you need to make sure that the <startup></startup> section of Inventor.exe.config has the following:

  <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true">

    <supportedRuntimeversion="v4.0"/>

  </startup> 

I hope this helps.

Cheers,