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.NET Bootstrap and its diffusion

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This message was discovered on microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.setup.

Francesco Delfino

Hi all,
I have the problem to distribute a plugin for an application I
developed, as simply as possible. The plugin aim is to detect if the
user is behind NAT or a Firewall, and try to override that. The NAT
traversal part is done, the Firewall bypassing is not yet ready (and we
still need some experiments). The program itself (without the pugin) is
about 1.4MB.

Possible solutions would be.
A - rewriting the code in C, once finished the algorithm
B - dotnet bootstrapping from network
C - using of .NET linkers like http://www.remotesoft.com/linker or
http://www.thinstall.com.

Solution "A" means rewriting and maintaining two code bases, one for
experimenting and one for deploying, or making experimentation slower
since writing in C is less rapid than in C#.

Solution "B" is the cleanest one, but:
B1 - it costs 22MB (x10 the size of the whole program) while the plugin
itself (apart dotnet) is less than 250KB.
B2 - someone complained that adding some more components to Windows
could make the system slower (it is clearly not true, but more than one
said this, so this is the mood).
B3 - I think that all the dotnetfx distribution requires downloading and
maintaining a dir with the updated dotnetfx.exe files for different
languages, and this is time consuming.
Better would be, if possible, to move the .NET framework from "Suggested
Update" to "Critical Update", somehow interacting with the windowsupdate
control, so that *THE* *FRAMEWORK* *WOULD* *BE* *DOWNLOADED* *IN*
*BACKGROUND* and the new feature available with the plugin, will be
visible after some time the program is used, *AUTOMATICALLY*.

Solution "C" seems somehow dirty but, it works without compatibility
problems (tested variuos side-by-side installations and seems to be no
problem). The whole enhancement packet will be just 4,5MB (not so
bigger) and there aren't psycological problems (like B2) since you are
not saying that there is a new system component inside the machine.

So I would ask to you all:
- Has someone had the same problems?
- I think that some people has choosen for A, some for B, and some forC:
what is your opinion now? whould you do the same choice again?
- What is MS planning for widely deploying dotnet (rumors said SP2
included it, but it is clearly not true, now: it just updates what you
already have)?
- What is current .NET diffusion in variuos countries (from my
statistics - 1.5mln unique / month in Italy -, only 10% of visitors have
it already installed. Same data says that 54% of the total visitors are
using XP, 16% windows 2k, 19% windows 98)?

Regards,
Francesco Delfino

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Tim Anderson

"Francesco Delfino" <Click here to reveal e-mail address> wrote in message
news:Click here to reveal e-mail address...

[Original message clipped]

I'm not keen on the .NET linkers, at least the one I looked at which was
thinstall. The product works and definitely cuts down the the size of your
deployment package. However, I noticed that there was little or no reduction
of memory usage; and in fact, if the user has more than one thinstall
package running, memory usage is higher than if running two normal .NET
applications. You also have to bear in mind that a thinstall application is
deliberately isolated; if for example Microsoft found a critical flaw in the
..NET Framework and released a patch, it would not be applied to your
thinstall-packaged app unless you supplied an update. Personally I'd get
your users to install the runtime; or if that is really impossible, recode
in C or Delphi which have little or no runtime requirements.

Tim
Modifying a VS.NET-generated setup:
http://www.itwriting.com/msiwrestle.php

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