Stuff From the Road: Binary Compatibility

 

Sometimes questions come up from the road when I travel and I thought it would be cool to share some of this info.  Here is a question we had a couple of weeks ago from a customer:

“[…]We are very concerned and paranoid regarding binary compatibility.  On our build machines we generally do not apply any patches for our builds using Visual Studio unless there is a critical reason to use a patch.  I would like to present to my team to use the new Visual Studio 2010 [service pack] if it is binary compatible with the base release version of Visual Studio 2010.  We are using Visual Studio 2010 Professional on Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server for 32 and 64 bit builds using C/C++.”

 

And, for your edification, here is the response from the C++ Team:

“We ensure binary compatibility in the libraries as well, within major versions.  So all SPs and QFEs for a specific product (e.g. VS2010) will be binary compatible.

Across major versions we do not guarantee binary compatibility […].  So, e.g., the MFC libraries in VS2008 and VS2010 are not binary compatible.”