More SxS

Early Adopter still isn't convienced that the SxS behavior is good. But, we do agree on the whole framework deployment being a pain issue:

"I agree, deploying the framework is a pain.  Why MS hasn't carpet bombed it out there like they did with IE is a mystery to me.  W2K3 perpetuates the problem, as it only ships with v1.1.  Is the OS plan to only ship the latest framework version?  If that's the case, then we're stuck deploying older Frameworks forever, which will completely suck.  MS has no sympathy for anyone who's not running the absolute latest version of X, on or before the day it releases (probably because everyone in MS has been running it for a year, so it's old news to them). 

Here's another thing.  Microsoft always faces app-compat issues when they release a new OS.  For the first time in history, there's actually a layer that insulates your app from a lot of the OS differences.  Microsoft could do a lot to help app-compat, which does a lot to help adoption of new platforms, by just shipping old versions of the framework with new OSs.  Is it too much to say that any new OS will ship with the 3 most recent Framework versions?  This would give you 4 - 6 years of compat, which probably isn't enough, but it's a start."
[Early Adopter]

Or better yet, why not include backwards compatibility features in the framework itself. Like this:

public void SomeMethod(...) : dependancy("mscorlib.dll",1.0) { }
public void SomeMethod(...) : dependancy("mscorlib.dll",1.1) { }

They do some similar stuff it in the OS already, why not do it in the framework too?