How to upgrade your project

When you install an upgrade, read all information about your LuciadLightspeed version in the release notes. The release notes help you figure out where you might need to update your own code.

For each LuciadLightspeed version, the release notes provide an overview of:

A LuciadLightspeed upgrade usually comes with a range of updates and improvements of sample code. If you do not keep track of the sample code snippets you have copy-pasted for re-use, it may become a challenge to benefit from these improvements in your own application.

Therefore, keep track of all the sample code copies you take, and the changes you apply to those copies. You can do this by adding copy markers at those spots where you re-use sample code in your own application code, for instance. You could also copy the Luciad copyright statements along with the sample code, and use those as copy markers. In addition, mark any changes you made to the code copies, or rely on your versioning system to track the changes.

When you receive a new product version, use a file comparison tool to find the differences between the sample code of the previous distribution and the new LuciadLightspeed version, and verify if and how those differences affect you.

During a LuciadLightspeed upgrade, a third-party library included in the LuciadLightspeed version may have been upgraded as well. As a result, some of the LuciadLightspeed code may have changed. If you also coded directly against that third-party library API, and the library changes are incompatible, you may need to change your code as well. Note that LuciadLightspeed never requires you to do so.

To find out which third-party libraries have been upgraded, check the Prerequisites page. The Libraries section lists the third-party libraries used with LuciadLightspeed and its components, along with their version number.

When you have established that a third-party library has been upgraded, go to the website of the library provider to find out which improvements and possibly incompatible changes have been introduced by the library upgrade.

It is strongly discouraged to upgrade a third-party library yourself to benefit from a certain bug fix or improvement. LuciadLightspeed may rely on third-party library features that become backward-incompatible after a library upgrade.