I have an application that requires .NET Framework 3. I am planning to deploy the application using a Setup Kit built by VS2005 deployment project. What is the best practice to include the last known .NET version (3.5 SP1 in my case) bootstrapper with the deployment package or include exactly what my project needs (.NET3)?
Thank you for you time.
In this special case, I would prefer the latest version and also bind to it, because the 3.0 version was kind of rushed just because Vista had to ship. On the other hand, this means that 3.0 is preinstalled on Vista, which simplifies your deployment. And installing 3.0 on a 3.5SP1 machine will just skip the installation, so no harm in shipping 3.0.
I'd still deploy 3.5SP1 because of the bug fixes and performance improvements, and because 3.5SP1 is completely backward-compatible to 3.0.
This helped me to do it the other way around, using VS2008 to create a .NET 2.0 package. Maybe it can shed some light on the 2 parts in the setup project you need to configure: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/targetnet2fromvs2008.aspx