Migrating from 4.11.2 to 5.4.2, private backing fields, serialization

[michaelcsikos]

I'm in the process of moving all of our code from 4.11.2 to 5.4.2. One of the big hurdles is the 5,500 properties that still use RelationshipTypes.PrivateField. Most of these are in two solutions which are not under active development, but are updated once a year for each client when a new version of AutoCAD is released. They are Windows Forms apps connecting directly to SQL Server / Azure.

It would not be trivial to convert all of these to managed backing fields and there is no budget to do so at this stage. Can we set the the SerializationFormatter to "BinaryFormatter" and kick the can down the road?

Are there any other breaking changes or things I should be aware of? Was there a blog post when 5.0 was released?

[rockfordlhotka]

You can use BinaryFormatter as long as you aren't using .NET 5+ or Blazor, where it is deprecated and/or just not there.

Another alternative is to implement some code in a custom BusinessBase class (between Csla.BusinessBase and your business classes) that uses reflection to implement the get/set state methods. There was a discussion here (or on Discord?) within the past few weeks about this, and I wrote some sample code to demonstrate the concept.

[rockfordlhotka]

Here's one issue that was filed out of that discussion: #2148

[rockfordlhotka]

Somewhere along the way in v4.x and certainly in v5, I started relying on releasenotes.md to maintain lists of breaking changes and so forth.

Here's the ongoing v5 releasenotes.md file.

Look for the 🛑 and ⚠ icons for potential trouble spots.