Multiple versions of Active Reports installed on a single machine

I have to correct some bugs of one of the applications of my client that I support. The version of Active Reports (DataDynamics) used by the client in this application is different o开发者_运维技巧f the currently installed version on my machine.

It is possible to install multiple versions of Active Reports on a single machine where some applications can use the plugin in visual studio with one version and other applications with other version.

When you have dll that are not installed in the GAC and don't installed as a plugin in visual studio, it's easy to change reference in visual studio to use multiple versions of a same dll.

When you have dll that are installed in the GAC, this is also easy because you can have multiple versions of same dll in the GAC.

But when this is a plugin installed in visual studio, I don't know how it can be possible.

I don't want to use software like VMWare because I have to install a totally new environment to just build a new version.

Anyone have an idea?

Thank you very much.

Major versions are likely to play nice with each other. For example AR 2 COM coexists with anything. AR .net 1 coexists with AR .net 3, and AR .net 3 coexists with AR 6. In the case of 3 and 6 I can verify that both sets of designer tools in Visual Studio are enabled and usable. I don't think AR .net 2 and AR .net 3 play nicely together though.

But according to Data Dynamics, minor versions don't coexist. That fits my experience, you can't have 3.0 and 3.0 SP1 installed at the same time.

So yes, you can do this if you have major version differences. If they're minor version differences, you need to uninstall your version of AR and install the one they're using before you can make changes. Personally I prefer to set CopyLocal = true on the referenced AR DLLs and distribute whatever version I'm using along with the project that way. It makes the install a bit bigger, but it also makes upgrading your AR version completely transparent to the client. They don't have to do anything and basically don't notice anything changed. There's no install at all in that case, the necessary DLLs are included with your project.