*.addin file version information

By Adam Nagy

The *.addin file that enables Inventor to find your AddIn dll and provides further information about it also specifies which Inventor versions the dll should be loaded into using one of the SupportedSoftwareVersionXxx tags.

The version info in the *.addin files follows the same logic that was used when the AddIn's still had to be listed in the registry. Here is some information about that from an older Inventor API Help file:  

Add-In Versioning

Most Add-In's need to confine their use to specific versions of Inventor. For example, an Add-In that takes advantage of any of the new API features in Inventor 6 will not work in Inventor 5.3. Add-In versioning allows the Add-In writer to specify which versions of Inventor the Add-In will be loaded in.

The versioning information is specified in the registry as a value within the Settings key. The names of these String values can be one or more of the following:

• SupportedSoftwareVersionLessThan 
• SupportedSoftwareVersionGreaterThan 
• SupportedSoftwareVersionEqualTo 
• SupportedSoftwareVersionNotEqualTo

The string associated with this value defines the version number. You can specify version numbers using two different forms:
[Major].[Minor].[ServicePack] or [BuildIdentifier]

The following are all valid version numbers:

• "5.3.2" – Specifies 5.3 SP2 
• "6.." – Specifies any version of Inventor 6 
• "..2" – Specifies any service pack 2. (This isn't very useful but just demonstrates that any of the Major, Minor, or ServicePack numbers are optional. 
• "6077000" – Specifies build 6077.

The SupportedSoftwareVersionEqualTo and SupportedSoftwareVersionNotEqualTo values can support multiple version numbers by separating them by a semicolon. For example, SupportedSoftwareVersionEqualTo = "5.3.0;5.3.2" will only support 5.3 and 5.3 SP2).