Comment by mrsteveman1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrsteveman1 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> But I refused to use WPF for my apps because back then you'd have to force the user to install the latest .net which I thought was too much of a bother.

That always puzzled me, even though I've seen some of Microsoft's reasoning and blog posts about it.

Microsoft has repeatedly stressed that you can't assume any particular version of Windows comes with a specific version of .NET preinstalled (or VC++ runtime, for that matter).

Windows already bundles various things, and the major .NET frameworks seem like the thing to bundle and preinstall, and they actually do[0], just not consistently or universally.

And, Windows Update can already update the .NET frameworks, in fact I recall that some new major .NET versions were treated as "recommended" installs by WU in the past and were automatically installed on systems that didn't already have them, but they aren't doing that consistently and universally either.

[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/astebner/2007/03/14/mailbag...

I think that’s one of the reasons that WPF never saw much use in terms of widely distributed desktop apps. You couldn’t assume the presence of a particular version of the framework on any given Windows install and (until now) you couldn’t bundle the framework with the app like you could with the JDK.

A lot of Windows applications built with .NET do a dependency check and launch the .NET Framework installer (often included in the installation package) if you are missing the minimum required version.

Of course, that is a system-level change, which can potentially break other applications on your machine (if they're written badly and/or poorly supported). .NET Core removes that by supporting side-by-side versions and versions packaged with the app, but it certainly wasn't critical to assume a given machine already had a .NET Framework version in question.

Honestly, with Windows 10 now including .NET Framework updates along with feature upgrades every six months, and the fact that pre-Windows 10 versions of Windows haven't that many more years to live, it feels like that advantage isn't as big as it used to be anyways.

My concern is .NET Core may lead to a lot of unnecessary software bloat. Where Windows has the current .NET Framework, but we still have to have six versions of .NET Core installed, and then half the programs on the computer don't use those and have their own bundled versions as well. I find .NET Framework already being on-system to be a big perk of writing my app with it: My software is a 7 MB file because most of the code is already built into Windows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com