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Saturday, December 19, 2015

What's New in XAF 15.2 Documentation and general upgrade tips

As you probably know, in addition to the new great features the version 15.2 introduced, there are also various improvements to the learning materials that will allow you get the most of DevExpress products and become a better developer.

The XAF documentation changes we are the most interested in are listed below:


Concepts and task-based help

Reference


As you can see, there are both totally new articles and updates to the existing ones. Hopefully, even people familiar with the framework will find something helpful here. As always, the full list of What's New In Help for all products is waiting you here.

General upgrade tips

Please do not miss the Breaking Changes in 15.2.4 .NET Product Line document and XAF-related changes in particular. This information will help you upgrade your project to the new major version faster. See the General Information > Installation > Upgrade Notes documentation article for step-by-step upgrade instructions. 

Note that if you are upgrading your project from a very-very old version (e.g. 9.3 - yes, it happens!) to 15.2 a general recommendation is to install each major version and check the What's New documentation (the list of Breaking Changes in particular) to upgrade your project code accordingly. Skipping several major versions and jumping directly from v9.X to v15.2 is not desired, because this way you will lose many helpful obsolete messages, because deprecated APIs are usually removed completely after a year or so. That is why we usually recommend our customers consider upgrading to the new major version at least once a year to smoothly process possible API changes and benefit from helpful obsolete messages.  Finally, in case of a large gap between your current XAF version and the latest one, it is recommended to upgrade the default XAF form templates (Default.aspx, Error.aspx) or their customized versions like MainForm/DetailViewForm, DefaultVerticalTemplateContent.ascx, etc., because there may be changes in them as well, which are usually required for introducing the new functionality (examples: onetwo).


To save your time, you can use https://www.google.com/advanced_search and search.devexpress.com to quickly locate information on changed APIs on the Support Center (http://www.devexpress.com/sc) and What's New(https://www.devexpress.com/Support/WhatsNew/DXperience/files/) sites respectively based on the errors and warnings you might receive from Visual Studio during compilation. For instance, if the Error List window reports you 'public XPObjectSpace(DevExpress.Xpo.UnitOfWork unitOfWork)' is obsolete: 'Use the 'XPObjectSpace(ITypesInfo typesInfo, XpoTypeInfoSource xpoTypeInfoSource, CreateUnitOfWork createUnitOfWork)' constructor instead.', you can search for this message or rather its parts in our support knowledge base and quickly locate a solution in one of the answered tickets. 

As always. do not hesitate to contact our support team if you experience any difficulties during the upgrade procedure - we will be more than happy to help you.

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