Craig Box's journeys, stories and notes...


Targeting .NET 1.1 harder than it seems

I'd like my application to be able to run on .NET 1.1, so I've avoided using all the new niceties of .NET 2.0.

Or so I thought.

First, I experimented with MSBee, which lets you build for the .NET 1.1 environment using the VS 2005 tools. After seeing how many errors my code generated in 1.1, while it compiled cleanly in 2.0, I thought "maybe reimplementing this in VS 2003 might be easier".
And while I've specifically avoided some of the .NET 2.0 things that would have been really handy, like the SecurityIdentifier class, which makes handling SID-account mapping easy, there's things I didn't know would be a problem. You can't set a registry key to be a certain type in 1.1. And you can't use half the features that the designer implements for you automatically. And even if you could, you'd have to hack at it, because they separate code and design with partial classes in 2.0.

So, to summarize, looks like .NET was pretty crap prior to 2005. And that means you need to have XP SP2, because it's not supported on SP1.

(/rant)

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