by Dennis
19. July 2012 17:41
After looking into the fluent query API that will be shipping with SphinxConnector.NET 3.0 in the last three posts, today we’ll be looking at a not so pleasant topic: the breaking changes of the next release.
Requirements Changes
The first thing to mention is that SphinxConnector.NET 3.0 needs at least .NET 3.5 to run. If you’ve read the posts about the fluent query API you probably guessed that already, as it makes heavy use of features only available in .NET 3.5 like expression trees. The next big change is that support for Sphinx versions < 2.0.1 has been dropped. The reason for this is mainly that SphinxQL has greatly improved with the V2 release of Sphinx and many of these improvements are being used for the fluent query API. For those of you that are still using an older Sphinx version, SphinxConnector.NET 2.x will continue to be available and also receive bug fixes if necessary. However, if you’ve not yet updated to Sphinx 2.x, now is a a great time!
Removal of obsolete members
All methods and properties that have been marked as obsolete in SphinxConnector.NET V2 have been removed.
New Namespace for the native API
The native API, i.e. everything that revolves around the SphinxClient class has been moved into its own namespace which (surprisingly 
) is called ‘NativeAPI’. With the addition of a new query API this a logical thing to do to keep things organized within the assembly.
A Namespace for Common Types
Types that are used in more than one kind of API have been moved to a namespace named ‘Common’. This applies to classes like SphinxHelper and SphinxException and a few other types that have been added in V3. One could argue that they could have just been left in the root namespace, but IMO tends to lead to clutter especially if more classes get added over time.
The only class that is contained in the root namespace the new SphinxConnectorLicensing class. It has just one method: SetLicense, which should make it pretty clear where the license key belongs. Since the introduction of the SphinxQL API with V2, there has sometimes been confusion about where the license key goes, because it had to be assigned the License property of the SphinxClient class, which is not that obvious if you’re only using SphinxQL. That property is now gone and hopefully any confusion about the license key with it.
And finally, the namespaces have been renamed such that the root namespace now named ‘SphinxConnector’. This also means that the assembly of V3 will be named ‘SphinxConnector.dll’.
Conclusion
While breaking changes are certainly annoying, I think that in this case it’s only half as bad. You have to set your license key only once per application, so that’s just a small change. The namespaces changes should also be easy to do with Visual Studio’s refactoring capabilities and even easier if you are using a tool like ReSharper.
