</--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.
yes, I have several responses concerning distributino of IE but the second part of my question specifically asked for a technical reason why IE 5.01 sp2 is required. That is still unanswered. > > 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? I certainly would not blame MS for doing the same thing. I only hope the intentions are as pure as that. [see my explanation below] > > 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? > Andew, I really appreciate your tone in this paragraph. Not confrontational and promotes good discussion. Let me see if I can relate my thoughts on it. And just to explain to others, I am posting this message to this list just to finish up this thread. I think this overall thread is (thankfully) nearly dead. The biggest reason behind my recent usage of the moniker M$ was my belief that the .Net runtime has been arbitrarily tied to IE to promote distribution of IE. Some of my clients are physicians that very often have boxes with Windows 98 that have been in service for years with no upgrades. Now, it appears that I will have to force them to download an upgraded IE before they can use my app. Now if I am not using any of the HTTP classes nor any of the web service stuff, then why might I need IE? The real difference [and trust me when I tell you this is not a plug for one over the other] is that I use many platforms and the MSFT platform is the only one where marketing and financial boundaries come into play. On Windows, a particular product/technology might not work on Win95 but will on Win98, won't work in Windows 2000 Pro but will on Windows 2000 Server. Not because it simply won't work but because Microsoft won't make as much $$ if they let you run it on Windows 2000 Pro. This is the type of behavior I don't like. I want MSFt to make money but I want to build my apps based on technical merit of the underlying system, not based on decisons made inside the financial pipeworks of Microsoft. <thread done=true/> Reggie You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com.
