Jaffir,
There are really two parts to your question?
(1) Is it possible for DevForce to build a setup.exe for a new version that could be installed without having to uninstall the old verson?
(2) Does moving from one version of DevForce to another version of DevForce have to be painful?
With respect to the first question, it is definitely possible. In fact, at one point last year, we had such a version. Unfortunately, we couldn't guarantee that we could upgrade all "old" versions, In addition, on an installation failure, it is more difficult to recover when you are doing an upgrade as opposed to doing a straight install. As a result, we decided to give up on the "upgrade" feature for DevForce 3.x.
With respect to the second question, moving to a newer version of DevForce does not have to be painful. The pain that often accompanies moving to a new version of DevForce has little to do with uninstalling the old version. Uninstalling DevForce is not a lengthy process and typically takes only a couple of minutes at most on a fast machine. The usual cause of pain is due to the fact that that developers often add references to DevForce DLL's with the "Specific Version" property of the Reference set to "True" instead of "False". If you avoid this mistake, moving an application from one version of DevForce to another is simple, typically taking only the time to regenerate all of the entities in the Model project.
There is a good writeup on migrating to newer versions of DevForce in the Installation Guide.
David
Edited by davidklitzke - 12-Jun-2008 at 11:05pm