How to manage differnent versions of AutoCAD

[Anonymous]

I currently developing a VB.Net customisation for AutoCAD 2015, 2017 & 2018.  These have different solutions for each version of AutoCAD and I have to ensure all are updated independently.  As we move forward to AutoCAD 2019, I would like to combined these into 1 solution, but I'm concerned about the references to the AutoCAD dlls and I'm looking for some advice.  Should I reference these dlls from the C:\Program Files\AutoCAD xxxx folders and control the pathing to the folders or should I copy these dlls into the solution and rename, then use the files names to reference these files. 

I'm looking for some examples or papers about solutions which span across multiple versions of AutoCAD.

Thanks in advanced

Steven Houghton

[moogalm]

Some solutions which our developer find useful-

1. http://adndevblog.typepad.com/autocad/2015/12/switching-assembly-references-based-on-build-configura...
2. http://www.theswamp.org/index.php?topic=50202.0

[_gile]

Hi,

If your code is the same for each version, you should first check if the DLL build with AutoCAD 2015 libraries (and .NET Framework 4.5) works with later versions of AutoCAD. Most of the time it does, if so, you do not need to build a project for each AutoCAD version, just use the 2015 one for AutoCAD 2015 and later versions (this is the way I do for many applications including those on Exchange Apps Store which share the same AutoCAD 2013 DLL for AutoCAD versions from 2013 to 2019).

If there're some differences between versions (different code or requiered references), you can create several projects in the same Visual Studio solution. These projects can share  the common code by using classes added "As link" to different projects.

[Rudy.Reavis]

Attribute declarations must reference their dll.

 [CommandMethod("MyCSCommand")]

How would you declare attributes?