.NET Support for Win9x

[Richard Brown]

I am hearing a lot of rumors/inuendo that is making me very nervous about
..NET.

Currently our company has a desktop application that we are *planning* to
take completely into .NET and I have been reviewing the obfuscators,
development, etc in order to organize everything properly.

However, I am hearing a lot about Microsoft dropping support for all Win9x
platforms for .NET.
I already know that it is not support on Win95, but people say that several
libraries don't work on Win98 and WinME also.
One such claim has to do with the FileSystemWatcher, which I see in the
documentation lists the approriate platforms.

Is MS planning on dropping some platform support, or is it only because
certain functions don't exist on certain platforms?
Also, is there a composite list somewhere of what specific
assemblies/classes work on which platforms, so I can make sure that we stay
away from them?

98% of our clients are Win95/98 and I have already forwarned them that the
95 clients would have to upgrade to at least 98, but preferably XP.

 

[Jay B. Harlow [MVP - Outlook]]

Richard,

Is MS planning on dropping some platform support, or is it only because
certain functions don't exist on certain platforms?

Yes and Yes.

Also, is there a composite list somewhere of what specific
assemblies/classes work on which platforms, so I can make sure that we stay
away from them?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/framewkwinsupp.asp

Hope this helps
Jay

 

[Richard Brown]

Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for.

 

[Franco Gustavo]

Be careful, I just could lose my job for this.



I promised to my bosses that .Net is going to work on 98 and ahead and
finally convince them to drop W95.

..Net framework only offer 60% of the tools necessary to make a complex
application and always you have to write your methods accessing to WIN32
APIs

After 3 months when I tested my application on 98 it works terrible, it
makes inexplicable things, the refreshing on the screen was totally crazy.



..Net CAN'T be debugged on W98, just you can use remote debugging, a REALLY
pain in the ass.

NT4 crash from the beginning because I was using SETMENUINFO, only supported
on W98 and W2000. No NT4.

I'm very caution with the memory reserved, and the GC takes 45MB when the
program is executing and doing nothing, I can't convince to one user for use
my APP and say at least you have to have 64MB reserved for ONE .net App.



So, if you are not going to use Win32 APIs "mmmm I doubts" then you are
safe, else don't promise nothing to nobody "you will feel bad".

I love .Net I did 45000 lines of code in my project and I enjoy program it,
but still it has a long long road to do before converts in the future
platform, just read more before start your project.



Gustavo

 

[Richard Brown]

Thanks for your input.
Were you using .NET 1.0 or .NET 1.1 though?
I've done a pretty thorough review of what our application uses and pretty
much everything is in the .NET framework classes. Although, there are a few
things that I will need to create, these are normally derived from the
standard classes.

Our application is pretty much just a database app with a lot of complex
algorithms in it.
No direct hardware accesses or anything like that.

I'd be interested in knowing what your app does that caused you to *have* to
access the API set.
Your mention of SETMENUINFO confuses me a little since, it appears, anything
having to do with menuing can be accessed from the Menu classes, or derived
from them.