Did Microsoft set out to confuse people with the .NET Framework? I often wonder (and rant) about it but that’s the world we live & work in. Each year there’s a release of some sort and for the last 2 at least, they’ve sent out awful messages!

.NET Release History

.NET 1.0 was a good start but the development environment (VS2002) was dreadful.

.NET 1.1 brought about a few fixes and shipped with VS2003 which was only a slight improvement in developer experience. I wonder if they know the “3 strikes and out” rule?

Thankfully the next release skipped a year. Shipping with VS2005 it was a huge improvement over the previous releases. Not perfect but altogether more rounded - basically, it’s what .NET development should have been from the start! Migration wasn’t painless but the new language features were just too good to miss!

Then common sense seems to get lost…

.NET 3.0 was nothing more than a few (albeit very very good) additions (WCF, WF, WPF, Cardspace) to .NET 2.0 so why wasn’t it just called 2.5 - it even needs .NET 2.0 installed :confused: Obviously marketing people got involved (hey, I know first hand what that means given I work for some of the ‘best’) and probably wanted a ‘new’ product to sell. There wasn’t an update to Visual Studio for this release but instead Microsoft released a poorly put together (some of which remained as a CTP) set of VS2005 extensions.

Roughly a year later - Nov 2007… What did they release but the latest version as .NET which is now 3.5. This is actually a complete package that, in comparison to .NET 3.0, has not a great deal in it. Also in this case the ‘.5′ doesn’t really mean add-on to existing - the download size is a now bandwidth sapping 195MB. Man alive, they really need to get themselves sorted! They also shipped a new version of Visual Studio, 2008.

Visual Studio Support

Each major version (excluding the misguided branding of 3.0) of .NET has shipped with a new Visual Studio version. Historically this has meant that an upgrade of the developer toolset was required to develop against the latest .NET Framework.

Well, just to confuse the picture further, this isn’t the case with .NET 3.5. Nope, you can develop applications that target .NET 3.5 using any VS2005 installation. Simply reference the new assemblies manually (Add Reference, Browse to file) and you’ll soon be doing snazzy things like making use of the System.AddIn namespace or maybe integrating LINQ to turn computer-geek ‘foreach loops’ into something more readable (not as if I personally had any issues with the former). Hell, you can impress your colleagues with your new found skills :cool:

If you *do* decide to upgrade your toolset (perhaps you’ll be wanting to use the XAML editor or more likely have a much improved user experience with .NET 3.0 facilities) you should also be happy to know that .NET 3.5 still uses the .NET Framework 2.0 runtime at its core. It includes a bunch of updates in the form of Service Pack 1 so there should be no breaking changes. Whether you consider the upgrade cost a worthwhile one depends on the features you use I guess.

Team Foundation Server

To round off, TFS was also updated and instead of being a significant evolution what shipped was merely a lightly polished update to TFS V1.1. Not exactly earth shattering and somewhat surprising given the level of uptake in medium-large organisations (i.e. not that many, quite a few have ‘plans’ but perhaps fail to see the benefits of a few products (SQLServer/Reporting Services, Sharepoint Services, SCM) held together with gaffer tape and bits of string).

Hopefully next time, 2010? things will be better