Question

We have a product in ASP.NET to which we keep adding new features once in 3 months. Now we have got some bigger features to implement which would not get completed in 3 months. We want to keep working on these changes but do not want them to be available for the customers until we decide. But we do want to make our releases once in 3 months which we would contain some other smaller features. These features also include some database changes.

What are the best possible solution to make this conditional releases in ASP.NET. We don not want to use branch and merge for now as it would take lot of effort. Any suggestion is appreciated.

Answer 1

Without any further insights into your product or what you are trying to accomplish i would say that you need to implement this kind of conditional release feature in the product itself.
If the changes are more of a stand-alone module nature. This way you can maintain the build integrity all along the development lifecycle.

However, in the context of a 3+ months release schedule i would argue that the branch-merge option is NOT something that takes a lot of effort. At most a couple of days up front to set it up, and a couple of days at the end of development to merge into main branch.
This is most certainly the best option if your new features will impact a lot of code in a lot of places.

In any case, do NOT clutter your code with

if (yourapplication.version != someversion)
{
   //do version specific stuff
}
else
{
   //do other stuff
}

This would eventually destroy your codebase