Upgrading to the new stable release of MapWinGIS - VS 2019

I am not sure if I want to upgrade to 5.3 or the prior build, but what I do know is that the GDAL utilities that I need are just not in the 4.9.5 release that I have built my software on. I need access to the GDALrasterTranslate tool.

I am at the end of this project, and everything is working brilliantly. I am terrified to update to the newer API for fear that I will break my code, so I have a really newbie question to ask.

in the visual studio 2019 environment, what is the best way to upgrade to a newer version of the API? and how can I protect myself if I need to revert back to the currently used API?

Thank you guys for any insight.

-Eric