When will .net support long paths natively?

Question

As many would have discovered .net does not handle long paths names well.

So when will .net support long paths natively?

By natively I mean with out any of the suggested workarounds like subst and pinvoke

Some reading:

http://blogs.msdn.com/bclteam/archive/2007/03/26/long-paths-in-net-part-2-of-3-long-path-workarounds-kim-hamilton.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/bclteam/archive/2008/07/07/long-paths-in-net-part-3-of-3-redux-kim-hamilton.aspx

Answer 1

Interestingly, the part of the thread you have missed out on linking: http://blogs.msdn.com/bclteam/archive/2007/02/13/long-paths-in-net-part-1-of-3-kim-hamilton.aspx

Does a pretty good job of explaining why they are not likely to address this issue until Windows itself can properly handle longer paths in all its APIs.

Considering that they mention Vista only has a 'solution' to ameliorate the problem, I doubt Windows 7 will do much better. In which case the answer to this question is probably something like 'not until somewhere after Windows 8 is released', so years yet...