NET Framework version penetration?
by Armand Niculescu 
One of the things I’ve always loved about Flash was the transparency regarding the player version penetration, adoption rates, geographical data and so on.
The way we could relatively easy decide what Flash version to target, e.g. “should we use AS3/Flash9 for this project considering that it’ll be completed in 4 months?”
Is there something similar available for .NET framework? Basically I’m trying to decide whether to move a .NET App from Framework 1.1 to 2.0 or not. Moving to 2.0 would ease our work, but on the other hand I don’t feel like requiring the users to upgrade (installing NET can be a hassle since it require rebooting).
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Comment from: Paul [Visitor]
Interesting that you feel that version checking for the .NET framework might be an issue for you. It would be if you were writing a desktop app, or component, to be installed on a client's PC, but if you're writing web apps then you target the version of the .NET framework you have installed, and if it is to be installed on a clients server then it wouldn't generally be considered an issue if they required a newer version of the .NET framework to be installed, especially as Microsoft have - to their credit - made it simply to have multiple versions of the framework on the same computer.
Or maybe I've completely misunderstood the point you were making.
Or maybe I've completely misunderstood the point you were making.
24 Sep 07 @ 14:13
Yes, I had desktop apps in mind. Sorry if I haven't been clear about it.
Consider this: you're writing a .NET application, not something earth-shattering, but maybe a useful utility. The installer weights let's say 5Mb. It doesn't make a lot of sense to include the whole .NET framework with it to make a 50 Mb installer, but you don't want to make the user download the framework unless absolutely necessary - ideally it should just work on his computer.
With Flash, you can make an informed decision: if Flash plugin v.X is supported by 90% of the browsers while Flash v.Y is supported only by 40% it makes sense to target version X.
But for .NET, the decision is not simple, especially for small free/shareware tools. Obviously, the safest decision would be to target .NET 1.1, but what if 80% of windows users already have .NET 2?
Consider this: you're writing a .NET application, not something earth-shattering, but maybe a useful utility. The installer weights let's say 5Mb. It doesn't make a lot of sense to include the whole .NET framework with it to make a 50 Mb installer, but you don't want to make the user download the framework unless absolutely necessary - ideally it should just work on his computer.
With Flash, you can make an informed decision: if Flash plugin v.X is supported by 90% of the browsers while Flash v.Y is supported only by 40% it makes sense to target version X.
But for .NET, the decision is not simple, especially for small free/shareware tools. Obviously, the safest decision would be to target .NET 1.1, but what if 80% of windows users already have .NET 2?
24 Sep 07 @ 18:47
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