<--cut--> I completely agree that this is a technical forum and, as such, needs to be focused on answering people problems. Just yesterday I posted a question asking why IE 5.01 is required for the .Net runtime to install. No answers. I am working on an application right now that I would love to develop in C# but may not be able to because some of my clients may not be able to install IE 5.01 Sp2 in order to run the .Net runtime. Now if there is a valid technical reason for this, I would like to know. If this is the famous marketing engine working to help promote distribution of later versions of IE, that is arbitrary and means I can't use this cool new system for purely marketing reasons. If this list is so tightly strung that I can't grumble a tiny bit when these types of issues come up, this this list should be moved to to microsoft.public list server and you guys should be put on payroll. </--cut-->
By my count you have 8 responses helping you to redistribute IE 5.01. It's possible that people don't know your other desired answer. Although I would hazard a guess that shell extensions/portions of IE are necessary for the .net framework base classes -- not so much the C# language itself. Hell, the language itself is available independently on *BSD, and a version is being developed for Linux. I would bet, however, that certain of the .net framework dlls for things like winforms and the ilk -- including possibly namespaces such as System.Net (the Http* classes, for instance), could very likely use portions of the IE engine. A large benefit of IE in general has been for a while that it provided available components for us lazy programmers to use -- could you blame Microsoft for doing the same thing? And you're perfectly free to grumble, all that Brad asked was that technical respect be shown -- which I think fair. We are, at least most of us, working with MS technologies. It would be a different story, to me, if your post concerned MS suddenly changing the .Net SDK license to require a $500 license fee per application or some such (not that that's true!) -- then one would certainly be mad at MS's money-grubbing behavior, and it would be more permissible to express distaste at that aspect. But when you're discussing a platform that the majority of the components can be freely downloaded and redistributed... Shouldn't it be M(!$), if anything? Andrew You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com.
