SharePoint 2007 and Detecting .Net 3.5

Question

I have seen in this TechNet article where SharePoint supports .NET 3.5. I've looked to see if SharePoint requires .NET 3.5 and it appears that it only requires .NET 3.0, even with SP1 or SP2.

Can anyone confirm that SharePoint only requires .NET 3.0 regardless of what service pack you have?

Also, is there a recommended approach for detecting the presence of .NET 3.5? My typical approach is to have a method that accesses a .NET 3.5 assembly and the JIT of that method will fail when I call the method if the assembly cannot be loaded.

Answer 1

Only .NET 3.0 is required (obviously the service packs are recommended). This version had only just been released when SharePoint 2007 came out:

• .NET Framework 3.0 release date: 21 November 2006
• SharePoint 2007 release date: 30 November 2006

I think your detection method will work although if an exception is raised you could get some performance problems. You could use this approach asked in another SO question or just check System.Environment.Version.ToString().

Answer 2

Even though I haven't seen any official documents regarding this, I have worked with many server installations that are running SharePoint/MOSS SP2 on .NET Framework v3.0 (and not v3.5) without any issues.

If it were the case that WSS SP2 required .NET Framework 3.5, I'm pretty sure that both the documentation would reflect this, and the installer would check for this requirement as well.

Answer 3

Only .net 3.0 is required, even with SP2. SharePoint of course supports .net 3.5 if you want (after all, both 3.0 and 3.5 are still "only" the .net 2.0 runtime with some additional libraries), but it's not required.

See also the System Requirements for WSS 3.0, which are mostly identical with the ones for Sharepoint in that area.