.Net 1.0 vs. 1.1

[Johan \MrDutchy\ van den Broek]

Here is the situation: I wrote a gui application based on the .net
framework (using managed c++ and msvc.net 2003) which runs perfectly
when .net 1.1 is installed.
However it doesn't run on the lower version (sadly the error message the
user gets is nothing usable, i.e. just: "<dllfile> not found" if i
remember right).

Is it possible to compile a project and explicitly tell it to use a
certain version of the .net framework? The things i'm doing are not that
fancy and requiring the user to have 1.0 would be sufficient in my case.

Of course a better solution would be to achieve compatibility with the
most recent framework release and all versions below is this possible?

 

[Carlos J. Quintero [.NET MVP]]

Hi Johan,

Is it possible to compile a project and explicitly tell it to use a
certain version of the .net framework? The things i'm doing are not that
fancy and requiring the user to have 1.0 would be sufficient in my case.
Of course a better solution would be to achieve compatibility with the
most recent framework release and all versions below is this possible?

Not sure about managed C++, but with VB.NET and C# you can use a .config
file (see the help docs) to set the required/supported run-times, so as long
as your .exe is not using methods only found in .NET 1.1, yes, it should
work with .NET 1.0, although you must test carefully.


--

Best regards,

Carlos J. Quintero

MZ-Tools: Productivity add-ins for Visual Studio .NET, VB6, VB5 and VBA
You can code, design and document much faster.
Free resources for add-in developers:
http://www.mztools.com

 

[Guest]

Unless you are willing to compile to COM, which means ditching the Framework
altogether, you are not going to get this backward compatibility with an IL
compiled assembly.

You can compile with the compiler for each version of the Framework and then
have the proper version of the assembly installed. Or, you can compile for
1.0 and avoid any changed parts of the Framework (primarily XML) and have it
also run under 1.1 (potentially losing a bit of funcationality).

It would be a wonderful world if you could compile once and run anywhere,
but the Framework is changing, so the core API is broken a bit with each
release. The backward compatibility (allowing earlier releases to run on the
newer version) is not an issue in most cases, but there is no forward
compatibility (runner newer on older).

--
Gregory A. Beamer
MVP; MCP: +I, SE, SD, DBA

***************************
Think Outside the Box!
***************************

 

[Johan \MrDutchy\ van den Broek]

Thanks for the replies, i will think about this some more. At the moment
i tend to simply require 1.1 however.