Assembly Compatibility Question

Question

I have a basic server control that I've written using .NET 3.5. If I give that dll to someone who is running a .NET 2.0 application, will it work?

Answer 1

Unless you are referencing any DLL's included in .NET 3.0 or 3.5 then yes it should work because the CLR versions are the same in .NET 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5. I believe there may have been minor changes to the 2.0 assemblies ("red bits") but I'll have to double check.

You can even just change the project properties in Visual Studio to target .NET 2.0 to be sure. If your app doesn't compile then it wouldn't have run on .NET 2.0 anyway.

Scott Hanselman has posted about .NET 2.0-3.5 differences.