How does Windows manage installation frameworks?

Question

Today you were asking me how the management of frameworks on Windows.

The new version is coming out .NET 5, that means I will have to install this version to install programs made with this version on Windows?

For example programs made in .NET 5 for desktop when installing them I will also have to install the .NET 5 or this comes in Windows updates?

Answer 1

No, the . NET 5 is not installable, just like any .NET Core which in the background is the . NET 5 onwards. It generates a self-contained application with everything you need and so just copy on the machine and run straight. Calls and runs, simple like this.

It won’t do anything special like install something before. O . NET Core 3, or . NET 5, has everything it needs in itself in a simple way and does not have those difficulties that made people adopt the web not to have to install something (and have had much worse problems).

Even it is already available (you don’t even have to wait for .NET 5, you already have in .NET Core 3) the possibility of generating a single executable with everything you need without having to worry about dependencies. So you have nothing to manage on the machine you are going to run. Your only concern is to configure the deploy when everything is ready on your development machine, but this is super easy and done with CLI dotnet that is gathered from . NET Core.

The . NET 5 does not depend on something previously installed and runs on any supported operating system, even not Windows. So you don’t have to install anything, not even your application (you only need to be available, you can run it remotely).

There’s nothing to update, you have an executable and that’s it. The update can be done as simply as possible, copy the new executable with the new version (or call it remotely). It may have a more sophisticated mechanism but it is your problem to develop or use a library that helps, already have some.

The . NET 5 (or Core 3) has nothing to do with the . NET Framework and has no reason why it come with Windows, including because it was made to run on other operating systems as well. It no longer works like the . NET Framework worked which was on Windows and was dependency. Windows doesn’t have to have anything or do anything for your application to work. Of course it has to have the basic operating system, but nothing special for it. I repeat, even because it runs on several other operating systems. It has completely changed the way it works compared to what you are used to with . NET Framework.

I’m being repetitive because apparently it’s not clear that there’s only one executable you call and execute at the time you need it, and there’s nothing else.

Of course if you can create an installer and do some kind of installation, but it is not necessary. Of course, if you want you can send a lot of separate files, but you don’t need them, they are optional things and I don’t see any advantage. An installer could do a few extra things before running the first time, but you can do the same the first time the executable is called on that machine.