Whidbey Redistributable

I was fearful that with the new features being added to Whidbey, that the .NET redistributable would grow significantly from its present size of 23.1 MB (24,265,736 bytes). Because I expect online downloads to be a major part of my distribution strategy, I had resigned myself to using .NET v1.1 up until the time I release Longhorn-only version of my applications. Longhorn is expected to ship with a post-2.0 version of the framework.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the .NET redistributable for the May Community Technology Preview (located in Program Files\Microsoft VS 8\SDK\v2.0\Bootstrapper\Packages\DotNetFX\dotnetfx.exe) was just 23.4 MB. The difference is virtually insignificant. I may actually be able to use Whidbey after all.