Is .NET 3.5 a smart prerequisite for a media center plugin?

Question

We have an open source media center plugin. At the moment, its download size is one dead megabyte.

If I change my plugin to require .NET 3.5, users may have to download 197 megabytes to be able to use my plugin.

I am at the center of a large refactoring process and am afraid to use some functional aspects of LINQ, which will significantly reduce the complexity of our code base.

Is .NET 3.5 a reasonable prerequisite for my application? My entire user base already has .NET 3.0 installed.

Answer 1

I think this is acceptable for an open source project. Windows 7, the next version of Windows, will ship with .NET 3.5. And: the likelihood that users of XP and Vista have already installed 3.5 for other programs is increasing every month.

PS: I am using your Media Center plugin. I am sure I will make this setting 3.5.

Answer 2

For the smaller .Net 3.5 Sp1 installer, a new feature called the Client Profile has appeared.

Setting up the .NET Framework client profile contains only those assemblies and files in the .NET Framework that are commonly used for client application scripts. For example: it includes Windows Forms, WPF, and WCF. It does not include ASP.NET and those libraries and components that are used primarily for server scripts. We expect this installation package to be 26 MB in size and can be downloaded and installed much faster than the full .NET Framework installation package.

Answer 3

I do not know why Microsoft did not try to make .Net framework 3.5 installed on as many computers as possible through Windows Update or a service pack.

But if you do not want your Vista users to download 3.5, you can target 2.0 on VS2008, 2.0 is built into Vista. As for LINQ, just find an alternative implementation, try LinqBridge . Everything else (derived variables, automatic getter activators, initializers, property initializers, lambda - this is only the magic of the compiler, independent of 3.5

Answer 4

Remember that not all of your users will actually need to disable the .net infrastructure. For example, Windows 7 users will already have this on their machine.