Testing compatibility for Whidbey/Everett

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**Update**

Clarification via EricGu...having an
Everett assembly reference a Whidbey assembly is not a supported scenario, plus generic
metadata will cause weird things to happen. Thanks Eric :) 

****

Someone sent a question recently to an internal alias so I thought I would share.
The question was what will happen when a C# V1 component consumes a C# V2 component
that exposes a generic class.  First some background information, there are two
types of compatibility, backward compatibility and forward compatibility. 

- Backward compatibility refers to a future version of a product, like Whidbey, supporting already existing functionality like something found in .

Forward compatibility refers to an older product, like Everett, being able to  
support a new feature like generics.

As you can imagine, it's easier to add backward compatibility since it is a known thing. 
Designing for forward compatibility can be more difficult as it is an unknown thing. 
The goal of C# Whidbey is geared more towards backward compatibility so that if you
write a component today for version 1.x, your component will "just work" in C# Whidbey. 

I decided to test what forward compatibility will work with the current Tech
preview for a VS Whidbey component to be used in VS 2003. To test forward
compatibility, I created a simple generic class with two static methods.  The
first method returns a generic collection, the second returns a non-generic collection.

V2 Code

public class GenericClass

{

     public static List<int>
ReturnGeneric()

     {

           List<int>
l = new List<int>();

           l.Add(1);

           return l;

     }

    

     public static ArrayList ReturnNonGeneric()

     {

           ArrayList ar
= new ArrayList();

           ar.Add(1);

           return ar;

     }

}

I added a reference to the
GenericClass in VS 2003. Using IntelliSense, the only method that is
available to execute is GenericClass.ReturnNonGeneric() since VS 2003 doesn't
understand a non-generic type.  Since VS 2003 doesn't understand generic
types it can't call the ReturnGeneric() method.