One of the VBWire links at the top of the forum pages takes you to "Multi-Targeting.. blah blah.. VS 2010" which itself seems to be nothing but a bump up for some Channel 9 interview with the unfortunately named Spotty Bowles. As we know Channel 9 lost all relevance to most of us when they went silent on VB6 topics in mid-2005, so I hadn't seen this until just now.

It was informative to see that compiled VB.Net programs do not run with "any" version of the Framework installed, and normally won't work with any version except the one targeted. While multi-targeting appears to be possible it takes careful gyrations.

Now, none of this would matter much except it seems to fly in the face of claims we've seen right here time after time (after time). Claims about how easy it is to deploy VB.Net programs, how you don't need to worry about Framework deployment because "it's just in there with Win7," and so on.

There are other gems such as how much crap was shaved off VS2010 "out of the box" to make the whole thing appear lighter... "but you can download it, yadda yadda tappity-tap."

It seems to come down to 5 targets now, between choices of CLRs intermixed with various Framework subsets (client vs, full) on top of each CLR.


It appears you can aim at one of these targets and chuckle to yourself that, say, the client Framework on top of the 2.0 CLR will work... but at runtime (probably once deployed to a user) everything crashes down hard after runing for a few minutes because you have finally tripped over a late-bound dependency that requires the full Framework.

What a travesty!

And all very reminiscent of the shattered fried marble world of Java runtimes loose in the wild.


So this single Webcast makes it clear that a .Net application that must run outside your development machine really does need to deploy the entire Framework/CLR for the version of .Net you developed against. If you hold your mouth right you might get away with targeting a compact "client Framework" but you can't count on users having that installed either. It also discusses the way some VB.Net 10 features work targeted against CLR 2.0 while others will just KABOOM unexpectedly.

I can't wait for Spotty Bowles to do his own version of Alice in Wonderland, but Lewis Carrol has nothing on him for amusing romps down the rabbit hole... once you get past his thick accent.


The interview finishes with a lot of apologizing, handwaving, and tap dancing about the many scenarios where multi-targeting breaks down. The good news is that if you're a Microsoft insider you might even find a band-aid for some of those situations. If you enjoy a good Wumpus Hunt the VS 2010 IDE will keep you busy for hours chasing down dialogs within dialogs within dialogs to track down your "Sorry, play again?" compiler warnings.

Once again, just like doing Java development.


You can read his Multi-Targeting Visual Basic Applications in Visual Studio 2010 to avoid 40 minutes of hard to comprehend speech and his failed attempts to make the stuff he says works actually work.