The following pages will go over how to upgrade your CSLA Templates to the latest version.

his article will help you upgrade your solutions templates safely and easily to the latest major or minor version.  The latest templates can be found on our Google code project and the latest nightly build can be found here. The first thing to do is to download the template framework you wish to update.

After the templates have been downloaded and extracted. Remove or Replace the old templates with the new ones keeping the same folder structure or simply update your CodeSmith Project File(s) to point to the updated templates. If you have custom made changes, this is where you merge in your changes. 

I recommend using our templates via SVN. This will ensure easy upgradability while keeping any custom changes. To update all you need to do is right click and select update.

Image Removed

The next step is to remove any template dependent references from your Visual Studio Project so the new references can be updated. These references would include the CodeSmith.Data assembly if you are using PLINQO or the Csla assembly. Both of these assemblies can be found in the Common folder in the root of the template directory. This can be done by clicking on your project references and clicking remove. The references will be automatically added when you run the templates. Please note that if the paths are the same then you can skip this step, but I recommend completing this step just to be on the safe side.

Image Removed

Lastly, if you have any build breaks fix them by compiling. You shouldn’t have any build breaks but this can happen if you are migrating to the next major version (E.G. 4.0).

If you encounter any bugs after upgrading please let us know by contacting supportWe strive to ensure that the CSLA templates are backwards compatible with previous versions. However, in some circumstances we break backwards compatibility to progress the platform. When we do break backwards compatibility, we ensure that the benefits of breaking compatibility greatly outway the benefits of not breaking compatibility. Please refer to this document when upgrading the CSLA Templates to ensure that you have the smoothest experience possible.

Upgrading from previous versions of the CSLA Templates

The following steps will guide you through updating your existing project to consume the latest version of the templates.

Updating Visual Studio Solution dependencies

The first step is to ensure that your solution meets the requirements of the version you are wanting to upgrade to.

Lets assume your Visual Studio solution targets Visual Studio 2008 and your projects target .NET 3.5 / CSLA 3.x. You are wanting to upgrade to CSLA 4.x. You must first upgrade to a version of Visual Studio that supports .NET 4.0 and upgrade your projects to .NET 4.0.

After you have verified that your projects are targeting the correct version of the .NET Framework, the next step is to update your assembly dependencies. You can do this by right clicking the CSLA assembly references in Solution Explorer and selecting remove. You must do this for all of your projects. This is required, because CodeSmith Generator will not update existing assembly references, it will only add them if they do not exist.

Updating existing CodeSmith Generator Project files

The next step is to update all existing Generator Project files. The Generator Project files will continue to point to the previous version of the templates if you don't update each template outputs paths. The fastest way to update a Generator Project file is to open it with notepad. Once you have opened the Generator Project file, you will want to update each propertySet's template node path to point to the current location as shown below.

change:

<propertySet template="C:\PREVIOUS.PATH.TO.OLD.TEMPLATES\Csla\Entities.cst" ....>

to:

<propertySet template="C:\NEW.PATH.TO.LATEST.TEMPLATES\Csla\Entities.cst" ....>

Once, this has been done, save the file.

Next, open the updated Project file with Manage Outputs and ensure everything compiles. If it doesn't, please ensure that you followed the current step, Please contact support if you continue to run into issues.

You will want to ensure that all properties are set correctly.

Regenerate

The next step is to regenerate by building the solution or right clicking the Generator Project and selecting build and check for template compile and generation errors in the output window.

• If you see any errors about template file not found, then you will need to go to the previous step and ensure that the template output mentioned has the correct propertySet template node path.
• If you are seeing an error that deals with a template property not being able to be set. Please check the release notes, to see if a property has been removed. If it has, or you are getting an error you can follow the previous step, but remove the property XML node in question and repopulate it via Manage Outputs. This is very rare if you do encounter this issue.
• Unable to compile or generate template. Please contact support with the full stack trace / output window and we will take a look into the issue.

If you receive any project compile time bugs and are:

• upgrading from a minor version of CSLA (EG., 4.1 to 4.2), then chances are you are running into a bug with the templates. Please contact support and we will get this taken care of.
• upgrading to a major versions of CSLA (EG., 3.x to 4.x), then please check the release notes or upgrade documentation below.

Upgrading from CSLA 3.x to 4.x

It is highly recommended that you read over the official CSLA Documentation when upgrading between versions of CSLA. This ensures that you are aware of all of the changes that will occur in your application.

In addition to following the steps above for upgrading your templates, you will also need to complete a few steps to ensure everything compiles when upgrading from 3.x to 4.x. Please follow the sections below after upgrading.

Updating existing CodeSmith Generator Project files

You will need to open Manage Outputs for every project file you updated and change the FrameworkVersion property from v35 to v40. This tells the templates to generate CSLA 4.x compliant code.

Update existing non generated partial classes 

Before you continue this step, please ensure that you have followed the previous upgrade guide and have regenerated. You will notice that there are some build errors.  This is due to the entity partial classes are not regenerated and there are some required changes for Rules or for Silverlight when migrating to CSLA 4.x.

Update Imported Assemblies

There were major changes to Rules in CSLA 4.0. You will need to update every business objects non generated partial class (E.G., Account.cs or Account.vb).

using Csla.Validation;

Imports Csla.Validation

using Csla.Rules;

Imports Csla.Rules

protected override void AddAuthorizationRules()

Protected Overrides Sub AddAuthorizationRules()

public static void AddObjectAuthorizationRules()

Protected Shared Sub AddObjectAuthorizationRules()