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.
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