.NET installation problems.. I must'uv been crazy to bother!

[Ai Haibara]

In addition to the name of the OS (Win9X/ME, NT, XP, Vista, etc.), versions of Windows also have their own version number - so that Windows 95 is (more or less) Windows 4.0. If you open a DOS/command window, you can type the 'ver' command, and it'll tell you exactly which version of Windows you're using.

More information on 9X/ME version numbers can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q158238/

I'm not sure why that one tool would be asking for Win 4.1, though. You're running 98, which should be interpreted as 4.10 at the least. Maybe it has a buggy version-checking routine.

[mats.hogberg]

What pisses me off with .net is that there is no backwards (or forwards) compatibility. You can, as a developer, specify that an app is written for version z, but will also run with version x & y, but developers are lazy...
In a few years, I guess we'll all have a few HDDs worth of different .net frameworks to run all applications we've come to love over the last years.
AFAIK, a Java app written for JRE 1.0 (some 10 years ago) will still happily run on current v 6.

/Mats

[Midzuki]

Ai Haibara wrote:

If you open a DOS/command window, you can type the 'ver' command, and it'll tell you exactly which version of Windows you're using.

Therefore, when MS gives the name "MS-DOS prompt" to the shortcut to
command.com, they lie to the ordinary user of Windows 95/98/ME
(and could someone please explain to me why MS has done it?).

{ quoted from http://ftp.cc.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/jdxgen95.inf }
+++++++++++++++
J D X G E N 9 5
+++++++++++++++

Well, a few people in 1996 emailed me saying that jdxgen.exe failed when
running in a DOS window from Windows 95. I went home & tried it on the
Win95 notebook belonging to my son. Sure enough, it crashed.

The crash occurs because the Windows 95 "DOS Window" is not a "real" DOS
- it is a shell emulating DOS, but still under the firm grip of the the
Win95 OS (and yah boo sucks to the Microsoft acolytes who flamed me by
news and mail for saying this.) One of the things JDXGEN does is to
adjust both the maximum file handles in the Borland C library, and also
within DOS. With the Windows 95 DOS emulation, this fails to work.
Thus JDXGEN goes belly-up when it runs out of file handles, which is at
about work-file 13 (20 - stdout, stdin, stderr, etc.)

Anyway, I posted a plea for help, and got the following:

>
> I am posting this is an attempt to find out more about a problem that is
> affecting users of my JDXGEN.EXE utility when they attempt to run it from
> a DOS window in Windows 95.
>
* From: Bryan McNett <bmcnett@io.com>
* To: "'jwb@dgs.monash.edu.au'" <jwb@dgs.monash.edu.au>
* Subject: Re: JDXGEN and Windows95
* Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 01:53:34 -0400

[ snip ]

* I saw your message in sci.lang.japan, so I've taken the liberty of
* porting xjdxgen.c to Windows 95. The output seems to work fine in JWP, but
* it's a little bigger than the jdx file that comes with JWP 1.3.
*
* I'm attaching the source and executable to this mail message.
*
* note: this is only a five minute patch job. jdxgen95 still behaves very
* much like a UNIX program - in ways that would be confusing to the casual
* win95 user.

So there it is. JDXGEN95.EXE seems to work OK in Win95 land. Just run it
from the command-line in a "DOS" window. Win95 detects that it is a
native Win95 executable, and gives it the full treatment - big address
space, paged memory, etc. etc. As Bryan says, it is really the UNIX
utility.

NB: running "jdxgen95 foobar" creates an index file "foobar.xjdx" (after
all it is a port of the Unix utility.) If you want to use the index file with
JWP, etc., you'll need to rename it "foobar.jdx".

Enjoy

Jim Breen

( BTW, and IIRC, Windows 95 SP0 was booted by DOS 7.0,
whereas Windows 95 OSR2.5 was booted by DOS 7.1. )

mats.hogberg wrote:

In a few years, I guess we'll all have a few HDDs worth of different .net frameworks to run all applications we've come to love over the last years.

So there really will be no way to stop such madness from going on?

++++++++++++++

[mats.hogberg]

mats.hogberg wrote:

In a few years, I guess we'll all have a few HDDs worth of different .net frameworks to run all applications we've come to love over the last years.

So there really will be no way to stop such madness from going on?

I wish I knew! Right now, I have 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 installed at work. To be honest, they aren't all that big (averaging around 100 MB) but considering the release rate of framework versions (and that they of course tend to grow in size for each release) coupled with MS faiblesse for bloating...

/Mats

[RLT69]

Same applies to Sun's JRE. I don't hear the cries of bloatware or monopolistic abuse. Or trying to ram OpenOffice down your throat. I have MS Office, so bugger off, Sun....just give me what I need to view web sites with Java objects. And, please, automatically uninstall the older versions of JRE - MS provide the capability to do it painlessly. 0.5GB is rather a lot.

If you actually had a point about Java, you did not make it. If you are downloading the JRE it does not make you install Open Office. So I'm not sure what your complaint is about Java. Open Office on the other hand does use Java and you need to have some aspect of it installed on your system.

FYI Microsoft DOES NOT automatically uninstall previous versions of the .NET framework. In fact, as others have pointed out, you need to have previous version of the .NET framework installed or your apps won't work!

That is one of the nice things about Java versus .NET backwards compatibility. And yes I write apps in .NET and have written apps in Java.

FYI - you don't need the .NET framework - you can compile you code into a DLL.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Same applies to Sun's JRE. I don't hear the cries of bloatware or monopolistic abuse. Or trying to ram OpenOffice down your throat. I have MS Office, so bugger off, Sun....just give me what I need to view web sites with Java objects. And, please, automatically uninstall the older versions of JRE - MS provide the capability to do it painlessly. 0.5GB is rather a lot.

If you actually had a point about Java, you did not make it. If you are downloading the JRE it does not make you install Open Office. So I'm not sure what your complaint is about Java.

I didn't say that. I'm refering to the dialog that tries to "sell" you Open Office. So, I say "F*ck off" - if I need the JRE, fine. Stop trying to entice me to get cr@p I don't want.

FYI Microsoft DOES NOT automatically uninstall previous versions of the .NET framework. In fact, as others have pointed out, you need to have previous version of the .NET framework installed or your apps won't work!

I never said MS did automatically uninstall previous versions and, yes, you need them anyway. The same is NOT true for JRE. I have nearly 0.5G of JRE incarnations, only one of which is required.

FYI - you don't need the .NET framework - you can compile you code into a DLL.

Can you elaborate? Do you mean you can do the equivalent of statically linking to the runtime library for the .NET Framework (not SxS) so that someone can run a .NET app without having .NET installed? If so, wouldn't that yield a large application containing much of the .NET Framework anyway?

[mats.hogberg]

I have nearly 0.5G of JRE incarnations, only one of which is required.

I have to admit that I too have no less than 8 JRE versions on my box! Each ~50-70 MB, a total of 498 MB.
As JRE is backwards compatible - Why isn't previous versions removed by the update service? Stupid!

/Mats