.NET Framework 2.0 Compatibility

Brad Abrams: Take the .NET Framework 2.0 Compatibility Challenge.

I was at a slightly loose end yesterday afternoon, so I took advantage of that time to check that Meteor Server, and the price checking/stock availability application we wrote for a large deployment at a UK retailer, still work correctly under .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2.

Meteor Server itself is mostly VB6 components – a server executable, an application-host component executable (ActiveX EXE in VB6 terminology), a few application-interface components which have strict binary-compatibility requirements – with a few bits of C++ where the VB6 environment really ran out of steam (TCP/IP printing, since TCP is a pain with the Winsock control, and a ‘callback’ component which replaces the use of minimum-delay timers). Applications are written as COM components. Recently – in the last couple of years – we’ve been writing new applications in VB.NET or C#. We’ve generally found that more productive than VB6. To do this we’ve built Primary Interop Assemblies [PIAs] for the application-interface components.

Meteor Server isn’t really .NET-aware. We do ship configuration files for the server and application-host executables, to force the latest version of the PIAs to be used. This allows older applications to run on a newer version of the server, without having to distribute the PIAs with each app, or all versions that have ever existed with Meteor itself. Remember that .NET binds to a specific version of an assembly, not to the most recently installed. We did try using Publisher Policy but had problems with it – sometimes the Framework would fail to load an application object, often crashing with an Access Violation in fusion.dll. Due to a misunderstanding in version numbers we had to ship multiple policy DLLs when using that scheme – one for every major.minor version of the PIAs we’d released.

Using explicit configuration reduces the frequency of this problem, but not to zero – we still occasionally see this in deployment, with Framework 1.1 SP1. It’s something of a heisenbug – it never happens when you’re looking for it. And a particular nightmare when dealing with VB6 code, because the VB6 debugger does not run your code as it will be run in deployment. Instead it hosts it in-process in the VB6 environment. You’re not even running the compiled code, I believe it translates the code to p-code and interprets that. While you can turn on PDB generation and debug with VS.NET or another native code debugger such as WinDbg, the generated PDBs are poor quality and don’t, for example, often include your local variables or globals properly.

Since it’s not really .NET-aware, the default behaviour of the Framework when loading into an unmanaged host applies – the most recent version of the Framework is loaded. We support loading alternate applications under application control in the newest versions of Meteor (I think the version currently available on our website is very out-of-date). The aforementioned price-checking application is actually implemented as four applications: a menu application which loads the others, the price-check application, the stock-availability application, and a head-office application which has testing features. This does mean that all applications will need to support the latest version of Framework, or the admin will need to tweak the config files to force all applications to bind to the older runtime.

Anyway, I’m pleased to report that there were no obvious problems using Framework 2.0 with any of these applications.