Advice needed

[Lugubrious]

Hi all,
I work for a small offshoot of a large company with very restrictive IT infrastructure only approved programs may be installed. Currently excel is used for far too many tasks that really should all be put together in one process.
Now to my question I can gaurentee that everybody has at least windows 7 but most have windows 10 now can I target .net 3.5 would that allow people to run the program without installation? The program will also require a database as well
Any help would be appreciated

 

[jmcilhinney]

I haven't used Windows 7 for a long time so I can't recall whether it's guaranteed to have .NET Framework 3.5 installed or not. You could try and see and, if it doesn't work out, you could recompile for .NET Framework 2.0, as the same code would probably still work. As long as the Framework is installed, your app won't require installation. You could use SQLite as the database as it will not require installation either.

 

[jmcilhinney]

Do be aware that nothing older than .NET Framework 4.6.2 is officially supported anymore. That shouldn't necessarily be a problem, although I'm not sure whether VS will install such old SDKs anymore, if you don't already have them installed. I just checked the VS 2022 installer and it does include .NET Framework 3.5 development tools as a component. Not sure whether that lets you target .NET Framework 2.0 as well or not.

 

[jdelano]

I have a VM for Windows 7 Ultimate and .Net 3.5.1 is installed, given there are no other versions I believe it is safe to assume that targeting 3.5.1 will work for you.