How to port Whidbey custom controls to Orcas

If you built a custom control in VS2005 (Whidbey) and deployed in user’s machines, what happens if the user upgrades to next version of TFS (Orcas or Rosario)? The Orcas client will try to load the custom control, but the custom control was compiled with VS2005 version of TFS dlls. Hence TFS will try to load those older version of TFS dlls and since they cannot be found they’ll fail with dll loading exception.

So for custom controls to be loaded in Orcas client, the controls have to be recompiled with Orcas version of binaries and deployed to client machines. This is because of the dll dependencies. Inside Microsoft, we use bunch of custom controls and we have one installer for Whidbey and another for Orcas. It could be same custom control code but just compiled with right TFS dlls.

What if customers have various versions of VS side-by-side? It is possible to have VS2005 and Orcas in same machine. For that purpose, we changed the search location of custom controls such that we’ll look at 9.0 folder under custom controls first and if we do not find required control then we’ll look at original location. So if you are building a setup for Orcas version of custom controls, install your controls under <custom control folder>\9.0 folder. Whidbey version of controls can continue to stay under original custom controls folder.

This also enables taking advantage of new features of Orcas in your custom controls while giving older version for Whidbey users.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 23, 2007
  What is custom control feature? Now you can show your own controls in work item form. See for http://blogs.msdn.com/narend/archive/2006/09/27/773025.aspx

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2007
  dosen't work for me. "Could not find file <custom control folder>customcontrol.wicc". VS ignores my <custom control folder>9.0. It's work only if I copy custom controls to <custom control folder>, but then of course I can't use custom controls in Whidbey. Any ideas? Thanks

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2007
  I'm using VS2008 Team System Beta 2 (9.0.20706.1)

• Anonymous
  December 09, 2007
  When you built your own custom controls in Visual Studio 2005 and deployed them on your TFS you possibly

• Anonymous
  March 24, 2010
  Similar statement is made in http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/srlteam/archive/2008/04/17/quot-unable-to-cast-object-quot-error-in-custom-control.aspx.   But I can't figure out where to get the source code for CodePlex.WitCustomControls.dll  to recompile it?   Any one can point us to the binaries?  :)