In these days all .NET developers are running to test the new Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and the stability of the platform (and the Framework too) are encouraging people to start deploy real application with the new .NET 2.0.
The just announced Go Live license is another step on encouraging this but... are you really ready to deploy applications with the new .NET 2.0? I mean production applications, ready to go on the customer side NOW. I'm curious to know this... if you'll start a project in these days (web application or windows form application, no matters) what .NET platform will you choose?
I've done a quick observation of all the real .NET projects I'm in contact (projects for customers) and I can resume my situation as follow:
Windows Form Applications:
Web Applications:
As you can see, the major part of my customers are working with .NET 1.1 applications, but there's a considerable part of them that works with .NET 1.0 applications and have not done a migration (I don't think the migration will be a problem).
What about .NET 2.0? I've few customers that are working with a Windows Form application written entirely with .NET 2.0, but ZERO customers that has start working with .NET 2.0 web applications. Why this?
Essentially, my customers don't see a big problem on working with .NET 2.0 Windows Form applications... the application appearance is good and they can distribute the application with a setup that contains the Framework.
For web applications, the reasons of the 0% are essentially two:
- sometimes they see problems installing .NET 2.0 on their web server, where .NET 1.1 is installed.
- some customers are the web server hosted externally and .NET 2.0 is not supported.
So, what choice to do when starting a new application today? This is my opinion: .NET 1.1 is the best choice for a customer today, but during development take the future migration in a big consideration (so check what methods will be deprecated on the new platform). However, if I've to develop a Winform application today, I think that the possibility to start it with the new .NET 2.0 will be a dilemma 