OK, color me surprised: I thought we’d discontinued supporting the .NET Client Profile a while back, but it seems I am wrong. First of all, a little background.
Way back in .NET 4.0 beta days, Microsoft introduced a “smaller” set of .NET assemblies that contained the major part of the .NET Framework. The idea was that deploying the majority of .NET apps would result in a smaller download should the deployed-to PC not actually have the Framework installed. I wrote about this in October 2009 – “Using the .NET 4 Client Profile” – when we were learning about the proposal (at PDC if I recall correctly). We spent a considerable amount of effort at the time in order to try and support this new initiative from Microsoft – you can get hints from reading between the lines in that old post.
Given all this, my question to you is, do you use .Net Client Profile when deploy your application? If so, here is some important news.
Although Microsoft continued to support the .NET Client Profile in .NET Framework 4.0, they discontinued it in 4.5. The reason was simple: the size of complete framework had decreased by about 15% anyway, all it did was introduce headaches for developers and their end-users, and current Windows installations include the Framework by default. Based on this, we have decided to stop supporting .NET Client Profile in 14.1 for some products, and we are going to completely stop supporting it in v14.2. Doing so will allow us to get rid of some unnecessary assemblies; however it will mean a breaking change should you still be using the .NET Client Profile.
What do you think? Are you still using it? Do you rely on this functionality still? Please let me know your thoughts.