• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

Changes to .NET project structure

arno

arno

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In this blog post I want to explain some things about the new development releases of my tools that I just put online. This time it is not an announcement for new exciting functionalities, but it is to let you know that the last week I have been updating my .NET projects. I started working on ModelConverterX in 2007 and at that time it was my first C# project. Since then I have of course learned a lot of new things, but the basic why my .NET projects were structured did not change a lot. Recently I was noticing that this limited me to use new libraries and other recently developments. So I have now upgraded all my projects to the .NET SDK format so that I can go to more recent versions of .NET in the (near) future. Also I have used NuGet more to get the 3rd party libraries that I use.

The development release that is now online does still target the same .NET version as before I changed the project version. So it still uses .NET Framework 4.8. But I plan that somewhere in the next weeks I will try to upgrade to a more recent version, probably I’ll go to .NET 8 directly. Once that is changed I will of course announce it.

The changes I made now have changed quite a lot internally. I did quite some testing to make sure everything still works, but still it could be I missed something. So if you have any issues with the latest development release, please let me know on the forum or by email.

Continue reading...
 
My desktop computer still uses Windows 7. I have no plans to update since it causes problems with some older FS utility programs I use for FS 2004.

It’s not a big problem, I’ll just stick with an older version on that computer. Since I’m using it for FS 2004 there probably will be no further updates for that Sim anyway.
 
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I'm with Tom on this one, as I also run Win-7 on one of my laptop computers since it cannot run Win-10.

With no more protection needed than Windows Defender, Malwarebytes, ADWCleaner, RKill, etc. ...it's "online", too. :p

However, most of my FS production work is performed on Win-10 Pro desktop computers.

Many thanks to Arno for being proactive, to increase options for new features in future releases of his utilities. :wizard:

GaryGB
 
Good question, let me check which .NET version is for which windows version.

But since Windows 7 is EOL, support for it will be dropped one day. Just like happened with Windows XP in the past. Sticking to old .NET versions limits the development.
 
I see that Windows 7 is supported until .NET 6.0, the versions newer than that don't work on Windows 7 anymore. I'll take that into consideration when picking a version.
 
Thanks for your kind consideration, but if .NET version updates are not retro-compatible to Win-7, I'll just perform any needed tasks using the newest versions of your utilities on my Win-10 computers ...instead of my Win-7 computer. ;)

I would rather see you able to implement cool new features in your utilities, instead of seeing any ongoing limitations.

GaryGB
 
I have to check what the differences are. Compared to the old version I'm using now .NET 6 would be a step forwards already and I suspect more 3rd party libraries are available for it. Ideally I would jump directly to .NET 8 as it is the most recent version.
 
It's understandable that there are still many users of Windows OS's that are beyond their EOL. It would seem that if your current projects are useful for that situation, you might need to consider keeping a separate repository frozen for those legacy systems and creating a new repository for Windows 10 and later. That repository would allow you to do framework and updated libraries that are needed for improved usefulness. The legacy systems are not likely to be able to run the simulators since 2020 for which your newer implementations will most likely be targeting. This way you can still serve those that need your legacy tools and those who are moving on with new systems. You will be able to progress using frameworks and libraries that are not also going out of support.

I too am a developer and have faced the need to stay with the updating of Long Term Support cycles. There are some very good reasons to do so.

Keep up the very good work you are doing.
 
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Of course the last stable release still targets .NET 4.7, so that will keep working on old systems.

Actually even Windows 10 is nearing it's EOL later this year. So it's a bit surprising to still have so many people using Windows 7 now. But a few years ago we had similar discussions when Windows XP was no longer supported.

Not all of the improvements I make are for MSFS now. Just over a year ago the FS2004 exporting was improved a lot and bug fixes typically affect all versions.

I'll do some more studying on the different versions and see what is the best way forward for the tools.
 
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