Hi,

Nothing has changed in terms of the saving and loading of layouts from one version to another as far as I know.

I wonder if perhaps the project itself is still holding on to some reference to the older assemblies - perhaps in the licx file. Or perhaps the assembly references have CopyLocal set to true?

Having multiple versions of the Infragistics assemblies (or any assemblies) loaded into memory will certainly cause a wide range of problems.

That being said, has Infragistics got any plans to investigate and think what went wrong in this process?

A .net assemblie should be able to cope with multiple versions and side-by-side loading.

Furthermore, the problem is very consistent in the sense that it causes loadlayout errors - don't you think that it tells us something about specific bugs in Infragistics code, Mike?

I'd say we're on the same boat on this issue - there's a bug Infragistics has to fix to make the customers happy, and there's also best-practice guides that the end-users need to follow.

As customers, we would expect it to just work. It wouldn't be acceptable if Microsoft says Word 2007 and Word 2003 cannot run at the same time - and we see this layout loading issue in the same way.

These are issues that users won't expect to see in robust commercial datagrids.

danglei said:

That being said, has Infragistics got any plans to investigate and think what went wrong in this process?

A .net assemblie should be able to cope with multiple versions and side-by-side loading.

That is not true. You cannot have multiple versions of the same assembly loading into memory at the same time and expect it to work correctly. This has nothing to do with Infragistics, it's a limitation of the DotNet framework.

In fact, if you load two instances of the same assembly (even if it is the same version) into memory at once, it will cause problems because the framework does not consider the two objects to be the same.

danglei said:

As customers, we would expect it to just work. It wouldn't be acceptable if Microsoft says Word 2007 and Word 2003 cannot run at the same time - and we see this layout loading issue in the same way.

That is not the same thing. Those are two different, separate applications. You can run two different applications that use different versions of the assemblies at the same time. But you cannot have two different versions of the assemblies loaded into memory within the same application.

We recently converted our projects to .Net 4.0 and Infragistics 10.1. I have two projects that save grid layouts. One project saves them as binary in a database. The other saves them as binary to a file. We've been using this arrangement since at least version 6.3.

We are now testing the new version and having "strange" errors re: loading layouts. My save layout method is simple:

Private Sub SaveLayout(ByRef Grid As UltraGrid)

If Grid.DataSource IsNot Nothing Then

Grid.DisplayLayout.Save(LayoutFileName(Grid.Name),

PropertyCategories.AppearanceCollection Or PropertyCategories.Bands Or PropertyCategories

.SortedColumns)

End If

End Sub

And here's the call stack from the error we're getting. It appears there's a problem with a "type".

************** Exception Text **************
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at Infragistics.Shared.Serialization.Binder.FindType(Assembly assembly, String assemblyName, String typeName)
   at Infragistics.Shared.Serialization.Binder.BindToTypeImpl(String assemblyName, String typeName)
   at Infragistics.Shared.Serialization.Binder.BindToType(String assemblyName, String typeName)
   at Infragistics.Win.Serialization.Binder.BindToType(String assemblyName, String typeName)
   at Infragistics.Win.UltraWinGrid.Serialization.Binder.BindToType(String assemblyName, String typeName)
   at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectReader.Bind(String assemblyString, String typeString)
   at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectReader.GetType(BinaryAssemblyInfo assemblyInfo, String name)
   at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectMap..ctor(String objectName, String[] memberNames, BinaryTypeEnum[] binaryTypeEnumA, Object[] typeInformationA, Int32[] memberAssemIds, ObjectReader objectReader, Int32 objectId, BinaryAssemblyInfo assemblyInfo, SizedArray assemIdToAssemblyTable)
   at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.__BinaryParser.ReadObjectWithMapTyped(BinaryObjectWithMapTyped record)
   at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.__BinaryParser.ReadObjectWithMapTyped(BinaryHeaderEnum binaryHeaderEnum)
   at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.__BinaryParser.Run()
   at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectReader.Deserialize(HeaderHandler handler, __BinaryParser serParser, Boolean fCheck, Boolean isCrossAppDomain, IMethodCallMessage methodCallMessage)
   at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter.Deserialize(Stream serializationStream, HeaderHandler handler, Boolean fCheck, Boolean isCrossAppDomain, IMethodCallMessage methodCallMessage)
   at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter.Deserialize(Stream serializationStream)
   at Infragistics.Win.UltraWinGrid.UltraGridLayout.LoadHelper(Stream stream, PropertyCategories propertyCategories, IFormatter formatter)
   at Infragistics.Win.UltraWinGrid.UltraGridLayout.Load(Stream stream, PropertyCategories propertyCategories)
   at Infragistics.Win.UltraWinGrid.UltraGridLayout.Load(Stream stream)
   at SAInventory.frmMenu.ResetLayout(UltraGrid& Grid)
   at SAInventory.frmMenu.ResetLayoutToolStripMenuItem_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.RaiseEvent(Object key, EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripMenuItem.OnClick(EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.HandleClick(EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.HandleMouseUp(MouseEventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.FireEventInteractive(EventArgs e, ToolStripItemEventType met)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.FireEvent(EventArgs e, ToolStripItemEventType met)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStrip.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mea)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripDropDown.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mea)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ScrollableControl.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStrip.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripDropDown.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)