InfoWorld jumping onto Win8 .Net trolling bandwagon.

Now adays, the media seems to love trolling on .Net on Win8.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/why-it-so-hard-push-good-net-patches-063

They complain about multi-versioning of .Net, which is an important feature of .Net platform. And they even called .Net 4.0 a patch? WTF?

How will it patch? Turn of Windows Update duh. If they want to install additional NEW version or "upgrade" to x.5, do it manually in Windows Update. Might I add, it is optional. It they want to use .Net6.0 in Windows8 in the future, they should understand it is only an optional update. 

Just want to rant.

Yeah especially because .NET is one of the few app platforms that does versioning correctly.  It was a huge improvement over Java.

@magicalclick:

The article is mostly about .Net patches too often being broken and needing repeated revisions. I too have experienced problems applying .Net patches, especially to older versions of the framework.

And I don't see anywhere in that article where he conflated .Net version 4.0 with a patch.

one thing the article does say nthat i agree with: we should be able to install say V4 and no prior versions and have app's just run with the installed version.  that would help with having to install so many patches and all the different versions of .net.

as i recall way back they started with the idea that an app would run on a later runtime. but now that seems to be hardly ever done / barely supported.

@figuerres:If you only have v4 installed, a .NET app will try to run on the v4 runtime. However, since Vista and 7 ship with v3 (and thus v2 also, since it is merely a subset), having a machine with just v4 on is a bit difficult.

Quite why patching it has caused this many problems I don't know, although the cynic in me suggests it might just be that devdiv aren't as experienced in producing fixes as windiv.

@figuerres:

I think some of the older apps works fine on .Net4. If not, .Net3 came with Win7 anyway, I don't even know how to remove .Net3 from Win7.

It is like DX, some DX8 games doesn't work on DX9 until the patch the game. Backward Compatibility is not always perfect. Same with IE BC hell. But, at least .Net gives us a choice to run on a older version instead. The problem is probably app devs getting lazy and never wanted to patch their own app to work on the newer version because they know customers can simply installed the older version and be done with it.

I agree with the article. Producing patches for something like the .net framework should be easier than producing patches for an operating system. I never understood why they have so many problems.

@Charles: Frameworks do not have to have excessive internal dependencies, nor are they required to be non-composable. There is not much to argue about here one way or the other since we are stuck with what we are given (you can argue previous decisions limited later design choices). But it would have been nice to update one library in the framework, without worrying about the others... and possible as well, with some effort such as behavioral contracts, and limiting dependencies.

Perhaps they should do a better job of deploying the updates, but actually deciding what to update is never easy. Look up "green bits" vs "red bits" on msdn.

http://blogs.msdn.com/search/searchresults.aspx?q=red+green+bits

At least it doesnt update as much as Flash!

@Maddus Mattus:

Thank GGGGGOD.