G
Guest
| "Damien said:| Yes, requiring a 23MB download may seem prohibitively
| expensive... IF your application is the only .NET application installed
| on a users machine. But consider how much space you're saving the user
| if you and 20 other applications all install the bits of .NET framework
| they need as separate copies...
Unfortunately, not having .NET installed on every PC is a huge problem for
any vendor wishing to sell .NET software. This is by far our biggest
complaint about Microsoft, and we are Microsoft fans. It's inconceivable
that Microsoft would invest so much in the excellent .NET platform and then
fail to ensure that it's installed on every PC. Our only guess is that
Microsoft is leery of forcing an install because then they may be also forced
to install the JavaVM.
We have spent the past few years (as part of Mini-Tools and my previous
company) dealing with the .NET issue. Now that the issue of having .NET 1.1
installed is finally waning, here we go again with .NET 2.0. We are unable
to upgrade and take advantage of the many new features and bug fixes in VS
2005 and .NET 2.0 because (from our data) less than 10% of our target
customers have .NET 2.0 installed, and less than half of those without are
willing to download the framework. Last week I bought a new HP PC for my
father at Best Buy, and even though it's seven months after the release of
..NET 2.0, only .NET 1.1 was pre-installed. As informed programmers, we all
know that .NET 2.0 is a benign & beneficial download, but try telling a
customer on dialup that they need to download a 20+MB file just to run our
program. We are losing downloads, evaluations and sales because of our
support for .NET.
Microsoft, if you are listening, the single most important thing that you
can do to help ISVs supporting the Microsoft .NET platform is to force
install .NET 2.0 on every PC as part of the next Windows update. Pretty
please with sugar on top!!