Announcing the .NET Framework 4.7 General Availability | Hacker News Reader

Announcing the .NET Framework 4.7 General Availability

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

106 pointsinsulanian37 comments

> You must install an additional DirectX component in order to install the .NET Framework 4.7 on Windows 7 SP1, Windows 2008 R2 SP1, Windows 2012 and Windows 2012 R2. The installation includes a single dll that will get added to your system. It will only be used by WPF applications. It is not possible to install the .NET Framework 4.7 without installing this component.

Why the heck should I be forced to install DirectX on a web server?!

Presumably because this is the desktop package of .NET runtime? WPF is the GPU-accelerated GUI rendering library, it makes sense that it would have a DirectX dependency. AFAIK it has always had a DirectX dependency, just one that was met by the base install on versions of windows that were supported. I think this is just the first time a .NET upgrade has required/offered upgrading to a newer version of DirectX, instead of just raising the minimum windows version.

Server/embedded/etc headless environments presumably want .NET Core instead, which added most of these updates in version 1.1 a few months back (along with VS 2017).

It's one DLL, required to render the UI components of the framework in a hardware accelerated and optimized fashion. You're not installing .NET Core, you're installing the real framework.

Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.

It would have been a small amount of effort to bundle it with the .net installer. But it is going to create big support issue if you have to tell customers one by one to install DirectX manually. Hope they will resolve this through windows update.

Games have traditionally shipped updated DirectX binaries with their installer, most the time you don't even see DirectX setup anymore. The redistributable files can be deployed almost invisibly.

Yeah but think of a typical .net application. Probably some business application used by a lawyer or a doctor. They don't install DirectX on their machine.

They don't install anything on their machine. They don't even know .NET exists or that the new release requires DirectX.

The developer will modify the installer to include this extra requirement. End.

That's not the bit that concerns me. It's that it's yet another reason for desktops not to update, which is just plain painful for people who develop ClickOnce applications.

Why would it be painfull? ClickOnce is stable and the only dependency is .Net 2.0 ( but you can use higher once off course)

PS. ClickOnce is awesome. A restricted Client ( you can't do everything you want with it), but it can be installed through a browser ( easier for the user) and it automaticly fetches updates ( if set up right, not hard)

Yes, but ClickOnce doesn't install .NET, and if you want to use that (and, for instance, a modern TLS stack) you need people to upgrade.

Windows Server has most of the client stuff... Server Nano, without that much legacy, can only run .NET Core.

Who said you need install DirectX? They said you need install single dll. No big deal.

So, twice as many pretequisits to install a regular .NET app?

there are a lot of windows server applications that needs to be running inside a user session and can't run as a service. so you have a graphical window anyway ^_^

I would suspect that increasingly the push is going to be on to emphasize DotNet Core for server-side work.

High-DPI support for Windows Forms is long-overdue.

Definitely. Can't see any signs of them backporting it to Win 7 though? Those of us to maintain heavy winforms apps aren't going to drop Win7/8/8.1 support in order to get HighDPI support.

Windows 7 is almost eight years old, and is multiple versions behind on low-level display-related components like WDDM. Expecting a backport of a change like this to it is not reasonable IMO.

High-DPI is handled automatically, you don't have to change anything in your app.

The improvements are Windows-10-only. Of course it has worked to some degree or another for ages. More or less.

Windows 10 Redstone 2 (Creator's Update) made HighDPI much more bearable. Sad to think that it didn't even work for the device manager less than a year ago. :p

I'm kind of surprised that it only supports .NET Standard 1.6. I would expect it to be the first .NET to support .NET Standard 2.0, since, you know, it should already be implementing all the APIs covered by the standard.

I wonder what's missing.

.NET Standard 2.0 isn't done yet. It will be supported once it's released.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/04/05/announcin...

> The .NET Standard 2.0 spec will ship later this year. .NET Framework 4.6.1 and later will support .NET Standard 2.0. At the point that .NET Standard 2.0 class library projects and NuGet packages start being created, you’ll be able to reference them from .NET Framework 4.6.1 or later projects.

This can't come fast enough! I am still pretty new to .NET Standard and how .NET Core and Framework play together, but it's frustrating trying to use a .NET Core class library in a Windows service as of today. :(

With this release, you should be finally be able to do that. The 4.6.2 framework only supported the 1.3 Standard, which was the reason we were boned if a .NET Core library got released targeting the 1.6 one and didn't explicitly include a .NET Framework version in the nuget package.

At least, I hope I got that right. I'll give it a try tomorrow and if it works I might just uninstall the .NET Core outright.

I wonder have they fixed their offline installer?

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/...

How long until all Windows applications render on high DPI screens without extreme blur?

Redstone 2 (Creators Update) was a nice progress towards the goal. It's still bad at places though.

Regarding "Creator's Update"

Explorer.exe is crashing constantly on a stock system. Embarrassing.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the blurring is a result of not being able to infer display pixel configuration and thus not using subpixel rendering.

In Windows 7 they had a feature called ClearType which was basically a wizard that rendered text using different techniques and had you choose the one you thought looked best. Is that thing still around?

I would imagine it's also a problem on MacOS using an external display.

You are wrong. The blurring is the case of applications not being aware of the higher DPI setting and still rendering as if they weren't scaled. That's why DPI-awareness is a part of the application manifest so people with 4k monitors don't get tiny windows. Instead the window manager scales the window to the size it should have. And bicubic scaling makes things soft.

Why are they using bicubic scaling instead of nearest scaling to the closest integer? (ie 2x, 3x, etc, not 2.2x, etc)

The factors are 1.25, 1.5, and 2, as far as I know. Note that there are many different pixel densities out there and they don't follow simple integer multiples.

As for the choice of algorithm, that has nothing to do with the scaling factor.

isn't it support Linux already? or I remember it wrong, this is all for windows.

Dissapointed that Windows Server 2008 standar is not supported, just R2.

Windows Server 2008 is no longer supported. (Windows Vista Server it is)

Yes, it is still supported. Yes, it has a different lifecycle from Vista

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