I get the question “Why does Visual Studio target only one version of the .NET Framework?” occasionally, and now John Rivard, a new VB blogger, answers. John is the other Technical Lead on VB, and I’m looking forward to him blogging more in the future!
As near as I can interpret John Rivard’s insightful blog (and someone please correct me if I am wrong here) is that the reason Visual Studio targets only one version of the .NET framework is because that’s how it was designed…and that this limitation was imposed by the design of the CLR.
This strikes me as yet another instance of "tunnel vision" being forced on developers. According to "Unification Policy", in order to target more than one version of .NET, you must have multiple versions of VS installed on your machine?? Does this imply that new versions of the CLR will necessitate buying new versions of VS to accomodate them?
Have we replaced DLL hell with Framework hell?