Why is XP Support for .NET 4.5 not happening?

May be meaningful to the conversation ...

Reading through a Paul Thurrott article http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/windows-7/windows-7-enterprise-deployment-143885 he mentioned a company called Browsium who is stating that 80% of large organizations are running XP.

80% is high.  Really high.  So I went looking to see how valid this Browsium appeared to be.

http://www.browsium.com/

On their site they mentioned the statistics http://www.browsium.com/2012/07/30/windows7-are-we-half-way-there-yet/

That is where I found the qualifier "Though it's difficult to find hard data on the situation, we estimate...".  So the 20/80 needs to be weighted in your mind accordingly.

Without transparent numbers it is really hard to know.  I sure hope we are not in the early stages of a technology divide between consumer and business technology.  Charles love to use the phrase "general purpose".  In a divided world I guess we will need 2 phrases.

5 hours ago, RichardD3 wrote

I wouldn't be too upset if we couldn't use 4.5 on XP/2003, so long as it wasn't an in-place upgrade. As it stands, we can either buy into the multi-targeting lie and write 4.0 code that won't work on a computer with 4.0 on it, or ignore 4.5/VS2012 and write 4.0 code that won't work on a computer with 4.5 on it.

Install a VM with only 4.0 on it and use remote debugging. It'll need to be a Win7 VM, since remote debugging isn't supported on XP in VS2012 but it'll still allow you to test under the conditions you would have previously (in fact marginally better since your VM can be free of any apps you normally have installed on your PC that might cause conflicts).

8 hours ago, davewill wrote

I sure hope we are not in the early stages of a technology divide between consumer and business technology.

I suspect we are about to see a divide, with Business rolling forward to Win7 and Consumers rolling forward to Win8... and XP being put to rest in the process.

@elmer: This discussion regarding .NET 4/4.5 and XP is a perfect example of friction that may end up driving a separation between business development shops and consumer development shops.

Definitely in the short term business will stick to Windows 7 (with Windows 8 for touch scenarios -- fingers crossed) and consumers with Windows 8.  Thinking further down the road when Windows 9 comes out in 2014 and businesses are on Windows 7.  The divide gets larger.  Then Windows 10 comes out and both businesses and consumers move to Windows 10 maybe.  Then we begin the friction cycle again with Windows 11 and possibly 12 before we sync again at Windows 13.

What if during those higher friction years the business market drives the Windows that businesses use in a significantly different direction than the consumer Windows?  How would things turn out if the prior years business pressure applied for XP had lasted even longer?  Is there a chance business pressure for a similar situation (for say ... Windows 9 (consumer) versus Windows 7 (business)) is heightened given their previous experiences with the XP Vista/7 divide?  Will businesses be even more adimant.

Hard to know.  Seems like a lot of businesses forget to factor in the development discount they get for being in the same general purpose computing pool as everyone else.

@davewill: I think that's unlikely to happen. In the perspective of I.T. department, having requirement to keep using an OS where drivers are hard to find is nightmare.

Most I.T. department buy branded PCs with service to create custom "recovery image". If the OS is not bought with the machines, these vendors will most likely decline this request (because they're likely to be unable to fetch all required drivers too). I doubt any I.T. department staffs will let this situation happen.

@cheong: True.  I hadn't thought of the hardware vendors and their small margins.  They definitely can't afford to segment hardware so that will be a key driver in keeping the pool together.

We had a problem at work that caused our .NET 4 application to fail on .NET 4.5 and that forced us to include .NET 4.5 in our testing phase.

We have no intention using any of the features in .NET 4.5 anytime soon but unfortunately that doesn't prevent our application failing on a users machine if they have installed .NET 4.5 even for previous versions of our application!

The other side of the problem is that we can't make our users stop using Windows XP so we have no good reason to stop supporting it for a long time to come.

So in conclusion, I don't really care that .NET 4.5 isn't supported on Windows XP but I hate the fact that it's an in-place upgrade to .NET 4.0.

Why in the world would Microsoft do this? The only reason I can think of is so they can phase out Windows XP and sell more copies of Windows 7 and 8. At the cost of developers all over the world.

I also remember people complaining about having 4 versions of .net installed back in the 2.0/3.0/3.5/3.5sp1 days. Not saying in-place upgrade is necessarily the best decision, but there are downsides no matter what you do.

@blowdart:Btw, I still think that even if Microsoft does not intend to support .NET v4.5 on WinXP, they should still release a seperate 4.0.4 update package for WinXP users.

.NET v4 is still under mainstream support, Microsoft does not have reason to prevent WinXP users to get an update for a currently supported product.

@blowdart:Fixes to .NET v4.0 of course.

Vista+ users can install the fixes by installing .NET v4.5, but WinXP users cannot. That's why I think there should be seperate package made avaliable to WinXP users.