.NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0 (beta) Compatibility

There have been a number of press articles recently about application compatibility between the .NET Framework 1.1 and the .NET Framework 2.0 (beta).  You can see an article in eWeek and an article in Microsoft Watch. 

 

 

You can get the full story on our application compatibility plans in a whitepaper that we just put up on MSDN.  Those of you who are frequent readers of my blog, (or those of you who scroll down a few entries;-) will see a request that we put out several months ago to get applications for testing compatibility.  Altogether, we’ve brought several hundred applications in for testing.  The whitepapers are an extension of this effort – we’re trying to tell you everything that our testing has shown us about application compatibility.  We’re also asking your help to test your own applications and give us the results.  Compatibility testing is never easy, but there’s time left in the Whidbey product cycle and, as Soma pointed out in his blog, this is something that we’re committed to getting right. 

 

 

What’s the best course for you to take at this point?

• Test your applications and let us know the results.  The whitepaper contains a link to detailed instructions for testing your application.  These are the same steps that we use when we’re testing applications that come on campus for one of our compatibility labs. 
• Send us an application for testing.  As I detailed in my blog a few months ago, we’re still looking for applications for testing.  Feel free to send me a mail at jroxe@microsoft.com with information on your application and somebody from here will be in touch.
• Realize that a beta is not the finished product.   There are already a couple cases where testing in the labs has caught a change that impacted an application and we’ve fixed the product so that it’s no longer an issue. 

 What else can we do?  Let me know.