What with the announcement of WinFX being renamed to .Net 3.0, there has been some confusion as to exactly what .Net 3.0 really is.  Kirk does a great job of explaining it here (a bit dated, I’m way behind on my news), but I’m still confused as to why this will be a major release and not a point release.  I do realize that the BCL/CLR is completely separate from the languages that leverage it, but we’ve gone from DLL hell to versioning number hell.  And now apparently the BCL/CLR version numbers are different from the version of .Net as well (in his second diagram, you can see that the BCL/CLR version numbers remain at 2.0…so we’ve got [insert language name here] v2.0 running on BCL/CLR 2.0, but with the addition of the WinFX stacks it’s now .Net 3.0?

Kirk says this in his post:  “.NET Framework 3.0 is an additive release to .NET Framework 2.0.”  Which says it all, this shouldn’t be .Net 3.0, but rather .Net 2.1 (or even 2.5).  I wish MS would keep things a little more in sync, otherwise testing all of these combinations of versions is going to get out of hand very quickly (and it already has to some extent).  Granted I’m thrilled about WinFX being backported to WinXP, and I realize that all the teams have separate ship schedules…but this isn’t .Net 3.0 until the BCL/CLR have reached 3.0 status IMO as they are the heart and soul of the framework…if they are 2.x, then so is .Net in this developer’s eyes.

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