Question

I am a Web developer who spends 99% of his time in Linux, but I need to develop a super simple application with VB or possibly C# (.Net). The only version of Visual Studio I have is the most current free ones. There MIGHT be a copy of 2001 lying around somewhere. Anyways, the machine I need to develop this for is running Windows NT4. I cannot change this because another piece of software runs on that requires it.

Is there a way to develop an app with the new VS and keep it compatible with such an old version of the .Net framework (1.1)?

If nothing else I could install Perl on the machine and write a command line type script, but given the people that will be using it GUI would be better.

Answer 1

I don’t believe you can target .Net 1.1 in Visual Studio 2008. Here’s one of the developer’s explanations, from a comment in this blog entry:

Visual Studio 2008 will not support targeting .Net Framework 1.1. This is something we really wanted to be able to support – since we know there are a lot of .NET developers working on .NET 1.1 applications. However, it would have been significantly more difficult to go back and support .NET 1.1 which was a substantially different runtime.

Thus, to fit in this release, the decision ended up being either to not support multitargeting at all – or to support only targeting .NET2.0 and greater. Because we really wanted Visual Studio 2008 to be a great tool for at least both .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 – we decided to put in the most multitargeting support we could fit in this release.