Safe to uninstall .NET Framework 2.0 and 1.0 after installing 3.5?

Question

I'm new to Windows development and I have a question. I'm using a Mac with Boot Camp to run Windows in dual boot, but I have an extremely small Windows partition (10 GB, because Boot Camp failed with bigger partition, due to the disk usage). After installing Visual Studio 2008 I continuously get low-disk-space warnings so I want to free up some space. I can see, from the control panel, that I have several .NET Framework versions installed (1.0, 2.0, 3.5, various service packs). I want to know if since I have the 3.5 installed, I can safely remove the other ones.

Thank you.

Answer 1

3.5 includes 2.0, so I don't think you'll be able to remove that one. You can remove 1.x, but I think it didn't take up much space anyway.

Answer 2

It will be safe to uninstall 1.x after installing .NET 3.5, unless you still have programs that need it.

As for .NET 2.0, it's NOT advisable to get rid of it, the reason being that 3.5 builds up upon 2.0. If you have IIS on your machine, you definitely won't be able to get rid of it.

Answer 3

As well as the other (correct) answers stating that 3.5 depends on 2.0, I'd suggest that you don't remove 1.1 for compatibility reasons. MS did a pretty good job making 2.0 backwards-compatible, but it's not 100%. Any application written for and tested on 1.1 is more likely to work on that than on 2.0.

Answer 4

But is there a way to know which applications still rely on 1.1? Apart from reading documentation of each piece of software?

Answer 5

.NET Framework 3.5 is an additive update to .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0 so you shouldn't remove them.

If you're fairly certain that you won't need Framework 1.x and are fairly certain that any 1.1 apps run just fine under 2.0 then you can uninstall that.

If you're running Vista on your bootcamp partition you could try Scott Hanselmans guide to freeing up disk space:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GuideToFreeingUpDiskSpaceUnderWindowsVista.aspx

At this time his site (unusually) appears to be offline, but when I used this I managed to free up 30GB of diskspace on my laptop.

HTH
Kev

Answer 6

Try something like CCleaner or the many tools around that can reduce your disk usage. There are even apps that can reduce the footprint of your Windows install as well.

Answer 7

I'd also recommend against removing any .NET version. Having them all installed gives you a platform free of any compatibility issues. However, if you really don't need 1.1, and you want to be absolutely sure that all unnecessary files are removed, you could just uninstall everything (1.1, 2.0, 3.5), and then re-install 3.5. After which you'll have clean versions of 2.0 and 3.5 (as well of some 3.0 files, I think).

Answer 8

As already stated, you can remove 1.1 or 1.0. If you run into a program that requires these you have the joy of reinstalling them. However, for ASP.NET apps built under 1.1 you can repoint them to 2.0 and it "should" still run, thanks to the retention of deprecated methods.

Answer 9

Thank you all.