JMitchell wrote:
We are still using version 2.6 because when we tried to upgrade to 3.0 it broke all our software that had dual primary keys that weren't in alphabetical order.
I am now having problems because we have upgraded our database to 2014 and I can't refresh the catalogue. I read somewhere that 2.6 is no longer supported so a driver won't be released to allow it to work for us.
Correct.
If you want, you can update the driver sourcecode of course, but we won't alter / ship any changes anymore.
How straight forward would it be to upgrade to the latest version? I won't have to go through other versions will I?
You can migrate straight to v5, however there will be some breaking changes you might run into. They're documented here: http://www.llblgen.com/Documentation/5.0/LLBLGen%20Pro%20RTF/migratingcode.htm (start at v2.6->v3).
Is there a setting I can change now so it keeps the primary keys in the order they appear in the database, rather than having them in alphabetical order?
Yes Please see: http://www.llblgen.com/Documentation/5.0/Designer/Functionality%20Reference/FieldOrdering.htm
Are there any other significant breaking changes? I've seen a thread about DynamicDataSupportClasses being deprecated - I don't think that will affect us. Our usage is mainly normal entity usage, typed lists (including creating them in code with TypedListDAO and ResultsetFields) and stored procedures. We have created properties and functions in custom entity code areas of the generated code.
Everything we deprecate is at least available as source for you, so if you run into something that's deprecated (we deprecated RIA services as MS did that a long time ago), you still can build from source and use that.
I linked above to the breaking changes which some might affect you and others do not. User code regions are still supported so that wouldn't be a problem. In v3 we moved elements to explicit interface implementations so that might cause some build errors at first, but a cast to IEntityCore or IEntity2 will likely fix it.