What’s Up With Visual Studio 2010 & Add-Ins?

I have received a few questions on the requirement to use Visual Studio 2010 for add-in development and if Visual Studio 2010 is required to develop add-ins. The answer is yes and no. To understand this we have to look at what’s happening in the RightNow agent desktop and have a little understanding of .NET backward compatibility. Let’s start with the agent desktop.

Prior to the November 2010 release the RightNow agent desktop, and therefore the Add-In framework, utilized .NET 3.5. This meant the AddInViews assembly was built using .NET 3.5 and therefore your Visual Studio project target framework had to be configured to use .NET 3.5. Beginning in the RightNow CX November 2010 release the RightNow agent desktop is leveraging .NET 4.0 this means the AddInViews assembly is now built using .NET 4.0. Due to this change, add-in projects will need to set the target framework to .NET 4.0 if you are building an add-in for RightNow CX November 2010. To date, I have only seen support for .NET 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010 and I’d imagine this will remain to be the only version of Visual Studio to support .NET 4.0.

Now let’s turn to .NET and spend a few minutes discussing .NET backward compatibility. When you write an application in a managed language such as .NET or Java you are writing against a specific version of that language (i.e. .NET 3.5 or .NET 4.0). In my experience anytime you write code against an older version of that managed language it continues to function in newer versions of the language. This means that your code written in .NET 3.5 will continue to run under .NET 4.0 even if you don’t rebuild your solution. If you should decide to rebuild your solution and choose to utilize some new libraries from .NET 4.0 then you will need to update your project target framework to build against the new .NET 4.0 framework. The result of this is you get the new .NET 4.0 features but your code will no longer execute in the previous version, .NET 3.5.

So how does this break down for add-ins?

1. Add-ins written prior to the RightNow CX November 2010 release were built against .NET 3.5 and can continue to function in .NET 4.0 and therefore RightNow CX November 2010. However, these add-ins can only function as is and cannot utilize the new .NET 4.0 or RightNow CX November 2010 features. If you need to change them you can do so and still leverage Visual Studio 2008, you just can’t reference the new .NET 4.0 version of the AddInViews assembly.
2. New add-ins built for RightNow CX November 2010 will need to be built using .NET 4.0 and can only execute on RightNow CX November 2010 releases and beyond. For those developers building add-ins for RightNow CX November 2010 and beyond you will need to use Visual Studio 2010.

It is my recommendation add-in developer’s upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 when possible. Using Visual Studio 2010 allows you to begin working with .NET 4.0 and therefore the new features in the Add-In Framework. However, if an upgrade is not currently possible it is still possible to maintain your current add-ins using previous versions of Visual Studio and have those add-ins continue to function in new releases of RightNow CX.