Managing breaking changes...
One of the things that popped for me during my recent FrontLine trip is that the tools and processes we use internally are useful to folks externally as well. We are doing great stuff with VSTS around that, but I think there is even more we can do.
One of the common problems I heard nearly every shop describe is the problem of dealing with breaking changes in a shared component. In many cases teams just need a way “publish” their list of changes. As you might guess in the development of the .NET Framework and WinFX we have that problem in spades internally.
One of the tools we have had sense the early days of the .NET Framework is called LibCheck… It uses reflection to walk two versions of an assembly and generates a list of the public changes (the adds and removes). In addition LibCheck has the smarts to know what is a breaking change…
Kit post’s LibCheck here… Check it out and let us know what you think
