SxS Part 2

Mike Harsh responds to Early Adopter regarding SxS:

"The behavior you desire was originally what the SxS policy was going to be for Everett. The idea was exactly what you stated, only ever run with the version the app was built against.

This guarantees that your app will always fail to run if the version it was built against isn't present on the target system. The flaoting runtime mechanism at least gives it a chance to run. It doesn't assure compatibilty, it just gives it a shot.

The reason we made this choice is that it is how Windows works and is the accepted compatibilty story. Can you imagine if the app you built on Windows 2000 required a recompile to run on Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows 98 and Windows 95? Not a happy vision.

I know that the purist in all of us wants tight runtime coupling, but the reality is that most app authors want their apps to have a chance to run and would end up writing the config file policy to change the runtime requirements anyway. The current story only forces you to understand SxS and policy if your app has a problem, and not if it doesn't."

Yes, thank you very much to the .NET team for doing things this way!