Will MS drop support for XP in .Net 4.* or 5.*? [c

Question

Does it matter to developers that the current, and newer versions of .Net don't support windows 2000?

It scares me to think that several of my clients still use Windows 2000 and although I may decide to stop supporting Windows 2000 one day, I don't like that Microsoft is pushing it on people's products.

Could anyone see Microsoft doing this with XP in the future to spur sales of Vista and later?

Just to clarify, this is not a bashing of MS in any way, I love MS, but it is a genuine concern that I would like opinions on.

In contrast I can't see C++0x implementors saying "it won't work on windows 2000"

I'm really trying to convince myself that I should be switching to .Net but this is one of my concerns.

Answer 1

Since I've gone through this recently here is Microsoft's stated support guidelines. Lifecycle guidance.

FYI support for XP should go through at least 2010 and if they are willing to pay for support possibly another few years. Will .Net 3[4].XX work on XP then? Possibly, but who is to know? Win2k is a very old system at this point and there are things that are just missing form the OS. Let it go.

Answer 2

If you look at recent technical innovations, notably Netbooks based on Atom processors, I think XP will be with us for a while yet, as most of this kit doesn't run Vista. Similarly in the mobile market, outside of Windows CE varients, we have XP embedded, not Vista. While major manufacturers, such as Dell, are still introducing new kit that doesn't support Vista, XP is here to stay,

Answer 3

No matter what technology stack you're using, there's always going to be a tension between "supporting the latest features" and "maintaining backwards compatibility". Where to make that tradeoff depends largely on the type of product you're building and the type of customers you have.

I used to develop a warehouse management application using C++ and SQL, and we always had to support at least two versions back from the "current version" of SQL Server because our customers were extremely reluctant to upgrade.

Answer 4

Considering that Microsoft has a double interest in this matter (selling you the new OS and producing the .NET framework), I would be very suspicious.

In actual fact, you will be able to support new .NET versions on older OSes using Mono, which is pretty much designed to be cross-platform and backwards-compatible.

Answer 5

Since the question changed after my last response, I'll add that 3.0 and 3.5 support for Windows 2k wasn't dropped "without warning". There was plenty of indication this was happening before the betas were ended, so I don't think the question is really worded fairly in this regard.

Answer 6

I guess it greatly depends upon the company. For example, I've been working with mixed IBM and Microsoft technologies and our customer has this AS400 platform which is very very old, they don't even support transactions or relations on their database but these big companies have invested a lot of time and money on their systems and they want to keep them like that.

What we done is to add a layer so they can use this information on a website. I dont see IBM leaving its customers behind, they still develop software componets to connect to these old techologies for .Net for exmaple and I believe Microsoft will do the same if they do a research and found that they have many customers still using Windows 2000. You might not have all the features of the newest technologies but at least im pretty sure they will maintain a layer of compatibility for it with their newest technologies. Its not easy to tell a company of more than 10k employees and millions of dollars invested to just switch to the newest OS or Database system, for they it wouldn't make sense and believe me, even when Microsoft wants you to buy the most modern software they won't stop supporting their old technologies especially if these big companies pressure them to either keep their legacy systems compatible or buying the other's company solution.