Question re: breaking the RhinoCommon and Grasshopper SDKs

Dear Users and Developers,

as we're moving towards a more platform independent .NET SDK for Rhino6 and beyond, it is likely that we will break the RhinoCommon SDK. Rhino6 has long since been designated as a breaking release and it is likely that plugins compiled for Rhino5 will not be binary compatible with Rhino6. This is all business as usual, but for Grasshopper it is a bit awkward, as GH 1.0 will run on both Rhino5 and Rhino6. When RhinoCommon breaks, it is possible that 3rd party GHA plugins will also no longer work.

Does anyone know of any GH plugins that are no longer developed which we will lose forever when the above happens?

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by huaxiamengqing on June 5, 2014 at 6:52pm

What do you mean by "break the RhinoCommon SDK"? One dll to two or more dll?

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 6, 2014 at 1:51am

Well initially it seemed as though we would remove the reference to System.Drawing and System.Windows.Forms, and implement our own versions of Color, Point, PointF, Rectangle and RectangleF. Then, on Windows only, we'd supply a bunch of extension methods that overload functions so they look like before. This means any existing code wouldn't have to be modified, but it will have to be recompiled.

As it turns out Steve has found a way to solve the problem differently, so we'll keep references to System.Drawing and winforms, but the question is still interesting to me.

Note that this only applies to RhinoCommon. Grasshopper 1 keeps all its references intact and won't break.

Permalink Reply by huaxiamengqing on June 6, 2014 at 2:24am

if you keep references to System.Drawing and winforms, it seems nothing changed--

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 6, 2014 at 3:32am

It depends, if a GHA project uses any RhinoCommon methods that required Color values (for example if you draw your own geometry in the viewport), then those calls will fail if RhinoCommon switches from System.Drawing.Color to Rhino.Display.Color. But as it turns out that's not going to happen for Rhino6 after all.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Permalink Reply by huaxiamengqing on June 6, 2014 at 6:10pm

Yes,Hope you guys don't do some no head changes--

Permalink Reply by Arend on June 12, 2014 at 3:25am

For GH, I think the biggest fallout can be with old C# scripts or examples that might stop working, these are the examples that will turn up in google - an have the tendency to be blog posts with examples (similar to how most of the old scripts that show up in the forum).

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 12, 2014 at 6:27am

These don't need to be binary compatible as they are compiled anew every time anyway, so we can made that work by providing extension methods. The problem is exclusively regarding compiled GHA files.

Permalink Reply by Tree on September 27, 2014 at 2:32pm

By chance is there a developers mailing list that can be subscribe to so that there is a single simple source for this type of correspondence information etc?

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on September 27, 2014 at 3:14pm

Nope, the only official content for developers online is this forum and discourse.mcneel.com

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

RSS