.net 3.5 Client Profile. Completly useless? Am i missing something?

Question

(NOTE: sory for my not so good English)

I'm currently evaluating the .net client profile for a future project, and there are some things I've found that I think make it pretty useless, unless I am missing something of course.

I've installed the client profile on a clean xp vm. When I developed a small test winform app (with compilation aimed at .net 3.5 client profile) and copied it to the virtual machine, I could not run it. The error message was that I needed .net 3.5 sp1 or greater. I guess the problem was with the sp1, is there a client profile sp1? I could not find it.

Then I opened windows update to get SP1. This is a 70MB update to sp1, completly missing the point of a "small" .net client framework. After this the application did work.

Another thing, the client profiles is an online installer. The offline installer is 255MB. ????. So less functionality and aprox the same size as the full .net framework?

Another thing, if you have any previous version of .net installed (which is not totally unheard of, vista and 2003 even include it) the client profile wont install at all. Upgrading 2.0 to 3.5 sp1 is a lot bigger than the client profile (28mb), so it would be useful if this was possible.

So, am I wrong with any of this? and if I'm not, has anyone actually found the client profile useful?

Answer 1

My experience is much the same as yours. Most importantly, I found that when using Visual Studio to create a ClickOnce application, the client profile simply cannot be installed as a part of the setup process, so you end up having to install the entire framework anyway.

Even then, it still doesn't seem to run correctly on all machines, so I gave up on it and just packaged the latest complete framework with my programs to guarantee success, making sure the project settings do not use the client-only option.

I'd personally like to see some documentation on the correct usage of the client-only framework and some justification for why it appears to be horribly broken in its current release.

Answer 2

You'll need to target the client profile in order to not add any requirements to your project that the client profile doesn't have.

Check this link on MSDN for information on how to do this.

Answer 3

You need to add a special .config file alongside the executable which indicates that the application supports client-profile. This file is automatically created by visual studio when you click on the "Client Framework subset" button. See client-profile msdn doc for more info http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc656912.aspx

Answer 4

If you're distributing a downloadable, mass-market client application that needs to be as low-impact as possible, there are some advantages to using the client profile. Here is a review of the installation time impact of the various versions of the .NET framework on various versions of windows (unfortunately doesn't include Vista):

http://coditate.blogspot.com/2008/12/impact-of-net-framework-on-software.html