One interesting response to my series on versioning of interfaces and abstract base classes is the one in which someone suggested that we should go ahead and break their code from version to version. They’re fine in requiring a recompile when upgrading. In terms of recompile, it’s not necessarily recompiling your code that is the worry. It’s the third party libraries you’re using that poses the problem. Buying a proper third-party library that meets a need that your company can be a huge cost-saving measure in the long run, especially for libraries that perform non-trivial calculations/tasks/etc... that are...
This is part 2 in an ongoing series in which I talk about various design and versioning issues as they relate to Abstract Base Classes (ABC), Interfaces, and Framework design. In part 1 I discussed some ways in which ABCs are more resilient to versioning than interfaces. I haven’t covered the full story yet and will address some great points raised in the comments.
In this part, I want to point out some cases in which Abstract Base Classes fail in versioning. In my last post, I mentioned you could simply add new methods to an Abstract Base Class and not...