I’m interested in your take on this article:
Is it really that hard to figure out if 4.0 or 4.5 is running as the article would lead one to believe?
Yes and neither Win 2003 nor Windows Desktop version below Win7 will become supported. MS reduced the disk usage, very likely by removing the OS specific portions (I am not sure about this). I use 4.0 only. If you think you would have .net 2.x, .net 4.x and .net 4.5 installed, this would make no one happy. MS gives 2 guarantees you can rely on, the .net version and the IE version. I think pure .net 4.x will become the option first.
you can probably find out if 4.5 is installed (And thus running, it replaces 4.0) from a registry key. If the OS versions are a problem, I have a tiny library that would let you use async on 4.0. It’s what I used for testing (before the preview)
Will that library be available as a “fallback” if only 4.0 is installed? I’m thinking I don’t like the way they did this right now. Seems to easy to screw up and have your app blow up on a 4.0 machine.
Microsoft is making .NET more and more messier with each release. 2.0 was awesome, simple, straight-forward and beautifully designed; every subsequent release has tried its best (and succeeded) to make the toolchain more complicated and “weird”, whether with newer framework versions that aren’t new framework versions (such as 3.0 and 3.5, and nor 4.5), the convoluted mess of hacks that some of the MSBuild targets (such as the Metro one) are becoming, etc. 