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This may seem quite simple to you guys; but can someone please tell me (or give me a link) WHY the newer Visual Studios (VS 2005 and later) do not target .net 1.0 and 1.1 frameworks? I have only checked out the VS 2005 and 2008 express editions! I am assuming that it is the same for the non-express editions too.

[Pardon the mixed flow of thoughts here.] I mean, from what I am seeing(perception of a layman); when one installs a particular .net framework, the installer installs the previous frameworks too. Now, I would like to target the older frameworks (1,1.1,2,3) because they are relatively smaller "installs" compared to say .net 4. From where I come not many people have a bandwidth to wait for that kind of download(home users and not business people).

Jazz
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  • Because those frameworks are old...? I'm not entirely sure what sort of answer you're expecting by asking "WHY". – BoltClock Aug 18 '13 at 12:37
  • Big changes came with .NET 2.0. The newer development environments did not support targeting the older frameworks out of the box. – Cody Gray - on strike Aug 18 '13 at 12:42
  • possible duplicate of [Visual Studio 2005 and .Net framework 1.1](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/536992/visual-studio-2005-and-net-framework-1-1) (also see [Can I still target .NET Framework 1.1 in VisualStudio 2010?](http://stackoverflow.com/q/8336817)) – Cody Gray - on strike Aug 18 '13 at 12:43
  • So MS just decides that .NET 1.0 and 1.1 old and chucks it out. Then why do we still install it? – Jazz Aug 18 '13 at 12:53
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    @Jazz That is different. In Windows you can still run old 16 bit programs, but you can't create them with Visual Studio. One thing is run, another thing is development. There were some little breaking changes in .NET 2.0 compared to .NET 1.1/1.0, so Microsoft made apps for 1.1 run under "real" 1.1, and not 2.0 that "simulates" 1.1 . – xanatos Aug 18 '13 at 12:58
  • So is there a link to an article or something that speaks about these "changes" - bcoz I searched and searched but was unsuccessful in finding any! – Jazz Aug 18 '13 at 13:01
  • You are just 8 years too late with asking this question and finding anything back. .NET 1.x is a historical footnote and turned completely irrelevant with the .NET 2.0 release. Particularly its support for generics is a big deal. For the IDE it is particularly the added Edit+Continue support, the re-engineered debugger interfaces and support for 64-bit code execution that made it difficult to still support 1.x projects. There just wasn't any point in wasting the resources. Fretting over getting .NET installed is similarly outdated, it comes preinstalled on the last 3 Windows versions. – Hans Passant Aug 18 '13 at 13:22

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Short answer: .NET 1.x is no longer supported. They're not going to help people write for an unsupported framework.

There are many "fixes" in .NET 2.0 and greater that aren't in .NET 1.x, I can't think of a compelling technical reason to want to work in .NET 1.1.

Not all newer versions of .NET "include" older versions.

Peter Ritchie
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