.Net client penetration?

[Guest]

THis may not be the right forum for market questions, I'm looking for
an active set of .Net / C# folks to help us locate the right
information. We're considering .Net for a client and need to be able to
rely on Windows existing penetratino of .Net

I'm looking for the following, :
- % of Windows clients that have .Net 1.1 or later installed as of
March 2006.
- What OS did .Net first appear in, preinstalled
- Does .Net come with IE and if so, starting at what version of IE
- If you write in .Net 1.1, will that code excute error free in 2.0,
and vice-versa, can 2.0 .Net execute in 1.1 framework (obviously
assuming you use classes that are avail in 1.1)?


If anyone can point me in the right direction to who or where to get
answers to these questions, I'd very much appreciate it!


Scott Milener
CEO
Browster, Inc.
milener (at) browster dot com

 

[Mehdi]

I'm looking for the following, :
- % of Windows clients that have .Net 1.1 or later installed as of
March 2006.

It's impossible to give a precise number here since the .NET Framework
doesn't report itself to anybody once it's installed. The only way you can
detect wether a PC has the .NET Fx installed is by looking at Internet
Explorer's user agent (the .NET Fx adds itself to its user agent). Of
course, these days, with more and more people using firefox and other
alternative browser, relying solely on this information to determine the
proportion of PC with the .NET Fx will result in a seriously underestimated
number. But here is an article dating from March last year that has some
numbers anyway:
http://blogs.msdn.com/scottwil/archive/2005/03/09/391199.aspx

- What OS did .Net first appear in, preinstalled

Windows 2003 Server

- Does .Net come with IE and if so, starting at what version of IE

No. The .NET Framework can be downloaded either from MS web site or via
Windows Update (in the optional updates). Application developers are also
allowed to redistribute the .NET Framework setup program within their
installation package.

- If you write in .Net 1.1, will that code excute error free in 2.0,
and vice-versa, can 2.0 .Net execute in 1.1 framework (obviously
assuming you use classes that are avail in 1.1)?

In theory yes. In practice, you'll have to test thoroughly your system
first because there are always breaking changes between .NET Fx versions.
Note that different versions of the .NET Fx can be installed side-by-side.
This means that even if the user "upgrades" to .NET 2, it won't break your
existing .NET 1.1 applications since they'll continue to work against .NET
Fx 1.1.

If anyone can point me in the right direction to who or where to get
answers to these questions, I'd very much appreciate it!

If you are planning to develop applications using the .NET Fx, don't forget
that you can reditribute it with your app. And that if the user doesn't
have it installed, it's easy enough to build an installer that will detect
that and launch or download the .NET Fx setup program automatically.
However, it's been quite a while now that every new PC that i see already
has the .NET Fx 1.1 installed (on Windows XP).

 

[Huihong]

In case you want to deploy your .NET client to machines without .NET
Framework installation, our linker and native compiler tool can be
used. It generates a package that guarantees to run everywhere without
any futhere installation, whether or not .NET Framework is installed.
More info can be found here:

http://www.remotesoft.com/linker/

Huihong
Remotesoft