W00t! Win 7 includes .NET 3.5 SP1

The first of Scott Hanselman’s “Top 10 Tips Working Developers Should Know about Windows 7” really made my day: Win 7 includes .NET 3.5 SP1. This probably doesn’t matter to you if you are not a .NET developer, but if you are, chances are you have had the same frustration as I did. .NET 3.5 SP1 is really what you want to be developing against, because it includes so much goodness, but in my experience, most users don’t have it on their machines. As a result, your potential user has to go through a good 15 minutes of download and a reboot – and that’s assuming the IT department is fine with that, which is not a given (personal experience).

This is of particular importance to me, because my pet project Akin, a free application that helps track down differences between Excel files, is written against .NET 3.5. I really needed WPF to create the kind of user interface I wanted, but this has proven a hurdle in getting people to try it out. You might be able to convince people you know personally that they should install .NET 3.5, but for the casual visitor who stumbles across a webpage and wants to just try out an application, asking them to download a giant file for unclear purposes first is just a killer. You lost one potential user, right there. With Windows 7 pre-sales making a solid start, hopefully I will be relieved of that issue. This is very motivating – time to get back to it, and implement some of the great suggestions I received so far!