As our VSTA Premier Support team here at Summit Software works with more and more developers who are integrating VSTA into their applications, we get a lot of questions about the .NET Framework. Some of these questions arise from the fact that Windows XP and earlier releases of the Windows operating system did not include the .NET Framework. For developers who wanted to take advantage of the rich features of .NET, this created obvious issues around the need to ensure the presence of the .NET Framework on each customer's system.
For more than a year, developers have known that "Longhorn" would include the .NET Framework. Last month, Microsoft provided some interesting details. In their announcement, Microsoft informed developers that Windows Vista will include the .NET Framework version 3. I doubt I was alone in being surprised by this announcement as I had expected .NET 3.0 to be released as the same time as the "Orcas" release of Visual Studio.
A blog post by S. Somasegar, Vice President of Microsoft's Developer division, helped clear things up for me. In essence, Microsoft has rebranded a set of technologies formerly known as "WinFX". These technologies -- Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and Windows CardSpace (WCW) -- were highlighted at last year's Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) as key techologies for developing Longhorn technologies. Microsoft has now rebranded these technologies as the ".NET Framework 3.0".
As is often the case when Microsoft changes the name of something, this rebranding confused many developers. Mike Gunderloy, an old friend of the VBA licensing program, has written an interesting article on SearchVB.com that helped me understand the relationship between the ingredients in the alphabet soup of developer technologies that will be available to the Windows Vista developer (WPF, WCF, WF, WCS. ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and CLR!).
In short, existing .NET Framework 2.0 components (including ASP.NET, WinForms, ADO.NET, and the CLR) will be included in version 3.0 of the .NET Framework in their current version 2.0 iterations. The other components of the .NET Framework 3.0 will be the new "Longhorn" components that were called WinFX until recently.
Interestingly, the .NET Framework 3.0 will be made available for installation on systems running Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server. Although it remains to be seen how many Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server users will bother to install the .NET Framework 3.0, it does make it possible for application developers to build against interesting new technologies such as WPF and WF without limiting their audience to Windows Vista.
It is already obvious that Microsoft will make the .NET Framework 3.0 a key part of the Windows Vista developer story. (See Soma's July 28 blog post for evidence of this.) As Windows Vista reaches the marketplace, I would expect to see the entire ".NET" brand de-emphasized as the "Windows Vista" brand attracts the bulk of Microsoft's brand-making resources.