I’m looking for people out there working with the Windows .NET framework. I think I found the answer to a lot of these questions on the MS Web site, but it’s all in legal-ese so I want to make sure I got it right.
1 - I’ve heard rumors of MS wanting a licensing fee - sometimes quite high (like $2K) - for commercial applications developed with .NET. However, I can’t find anything about that on the MS Web Site. This site seems to say that as long as you have Win98 or above, you can install the necessary .Net framework tools required to run executables written in .Net. Do I have that right?
2 - If the above is correct, then people running Win95 cannot legally run .NET-developed apps. Is that correct? Is there some sort of problem with developing .NET apps for Win95, much like you couldn’t create 16 bit C++ applications with, IIRC, VC++ 5.0 and had to make 'em with VC++ 4.0?
Unless I’m mistaken, .NET relies very heavily on internet integration with the OS. It may be the case that the necessary support just isn’t there in win95.
Speaking as a software developer, its annoying to program for Windows 95. Many useful API functions only showed up with Internet Explorer 4.0, and were first bundled together in Win98 with the rest of the goodies that Microsoft did.
So if you want to make a program that takes advantage of neat new features as well as work on 95, you’ve got to install IE+world+dog to bring 95 up to date. NT is just as bad. 98SE, ME, 2000, and XP all were very similar though, to the point where there’s a new model for device drivers that works on all of them. Now, since all future development will be based on the NT/2000/XP tree, life is better for us poor software developers.