Hello Scott M.,
I may be wrong (wouldn't be the first time), but for VS 2010 to be
able to build applications against 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, or 4, you'd need to
have each one of those Frameworks installed separately. How is the
4.0 CLR going to act like the 2.0 CLR if you choose to target a 2.0
Framework app. in VS 2010? This seems to go against the whole idea of
side-by-side execution and means that now the Framework is
backwards-compatible, which I dont think it is.
It is my belief ( I have not checked this)
That there are 3 distinct stacks
1.x Stack = 1.0 CLR + 1.0 and 1.1 libraries (not entirely sure about this)
2.0 Stack = 2.0 CLR + 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 Libs - 2.0 libs contain copies of
relavent previous libs.
4.0 Stack = 4.0 CLR + 4.0 Libraries - 4.0 libs contain copies of relavent
previous libs.
Each stack is totally independant of other stacks and can be installed or
not with no detriment to the others.
However you are correct that if the development tools target a stack or set
of libraries, then those Stacks /Libs would need to be present on the dev
machine.
Therefore I find it reasonable that on a Dev10 machine, you would find the
2.0 stack and the 4.0 stack both installed.
However if you wrote a program targetting 4.0, then I believe the target
machine would only need 4.0 installed and you would not need a 2.0 stack
on that machine.
I would welcome any comment on these theories as that is all they are.