Classic British Flight Sim

I received a high priority update for MS.Net SP1 yesterday from the Microsoft website.It was a 248meg download which installed ok.Was just wondering if anyone can explain what ms.net is without getting too technical? :think: EricT

Hi Eric..

I got it too.. Net Framework v3.5 or something or other.. a cumulative update. I don't have Net Framework 3.. only 2 and this SP updates the lot. I'm not sure if all of that upgrade would be downloaded/required.. much like other service packs. It depends on how up to date you are.
Like you.. I'm wondering if I actually need this and haven't accepted it yet :think:

ATB

DaveB :tab:

Well, I'll try :-)

It's an almost "language independant" Just-in-time compiler (JiT)..... ;-)

what that means, is that it's a kind of overlay on your computer that takes care that any programs using the MS.NET functionality will be able to run on your PC.

It's a Common Language Runtime (CLR) that uses JiT, and thus any java programmer or C+ og BASIC or VisualBasic or PASCAL or you-name-it programmer that uses their own preferred programming language, and this language as been upgraded to make use of the possibilities of the CLR (MS.NET), will be able to run their platform.

As with all other programs .NET is also under constant development and thus you will receive Security Updates and even new versions of the CLR, I think the dot-NET Framework is on v. 3.1 at the moment. (well apparently 3.5)

Programs written to be compatible with the dot-NET FW version 1.1 will not run a dot-NET version 2.0 etc. but normally a good programmer will also describe in the prerequisites that you have to have a certain version of the dot-NET FW installed to be able to run his or her application......

Actually it compiles the code twice, first from the code to MSIL (MicroSoft Intermediate Language) which is machine independent and then into machine specific code using the CLR and JiT. And thereby you can also say that it is Operation System (OS) Independent.

Is that clear as ink?

Dan did his explanation, but here is an idiot's understanding!


.NET is a Microsoft programming framework. You probably already have some programmes that require it - they seem remarkably small to download until you find that you need to download the relevant .NET files of several tens of megabytes. Of course once you have the needed version installed, you don't need to download it again.

Problem (?) is that so far there has been version 1, 2 and 3. And it seems (Ben, help here!) that programmes using previous versions do not work with the current version.

Looks like what you have is the latest upgrade - quite how it works given that Dave does not have version 3 . Don't worry Microsoft knows best.

Now over to Ben

Thanks Dan and Ian.Couldn't have put it better myself. Will it improve my landings in FS? :think: EricT

Only if you land using the CLR along with the JiT ;-) :tab:

Only if you land using the CLR along with the JiT

That explains it.Those controls seem to missing on aircraft I use.Better let Rick and DM etc know! EricT

Hi Chaps,

Current version of Dot Net is 3.5 SP1. This includes 2.0 3.0 and 3.5 with all updates. It is a big ish download firstime, but after that its only does delta updates. Version 1.0 of the Dot net stuff was finalised at 1.1 SP1 and may still be required as some programs will use this if they were developed a while ago. It is not being added to, just security fixed if necessary. If you think dot net is a big download, have a look at Sun's Java which I'm sure many of you have installed. Every few months they update it, and if you apply these updates, they don't remove of upgrade the previous version, they install an additional one!!! and each is in excess of 150MB!!! One of our support giys was doing some work on a users laptop recently that had over 1GB of Sun Java runtimes installed (about 8 different versions) because every time it poped up telling him there was an update, he just did followed the instructions and updated it

Thanks guys.There are some real smart cookies on this site.Unfortunately I'm not one of them. EricT

You can actually see which versions of the dot-NET Framework you have installed if you browse to this location:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework

the subfolder(s) will indicate which version(s) you have installed