We have few dozen of GHI based products installed all around the world since 2011. When we started deploying these items we were working with 4.1SDK and bugs after bugs we have moved till the last SDK on our main firmware. The problem is that sometimes we get the products back and we are not abble to deploy easily the new sdk on these old platform. While updating to the last stable sdk for each major release is possible I have now some trouble for example to deploy on the 4.3.7.10 one with completely reinstalling the GHI Electronics NETMF SDK 2015 R1 and this need to uninstall first the 4.3.8.1…
This is really painfull and a real waste of time… Is there’s a way to achieve this that I don’t know (excepting using virtual machine…)
The reason, I’m sure, is tied to the VS integration. I suspect that it has a simple “major version” targeting capability and there are many minor version challenges that would have to be handled to expand on that.
If all you want is the firmware itself, that’s something you could do a once-off install of and collect the firmware files centrally. That would allow you to redeploy a particular version of the firmware and then redeploy your source controlled app, to get back to a known-working state. But if you want to do ongoing product maintenance and management, to reapply the same version firmware as the device had and deploy a new version of an app (without updating that to the current firmware version), you really need a separate VS instance with the right SDKs installed.