Can WCF run on Win2k?

Question

What is needed to either support WCF on Win2k, or at least minimize the effort in supporting remote communication with Win2k servers via .Net?

Background:

A product I'm working on has a legacy .NET remoting implementation that has been largely replaced by the WCF for new development. The legacy implementation is used as a fall-back for communication with servers running older versions prior to our WCF implementation.

Sales has asked for Win2k support which leaves dev in somewhat of a pickle as .NET 3.0 (and therefore presumably WCF) is not supported on Win2k. We want to support Win2k with a minimum of extra development effort, but it seems that to support Win2k we must implement the interfaces twice; once for remoting with legacy servers and once for WCF.

Answer 1

Windows 2000 will only run .Net 2.0 and earlier. WCF requires 3.0 or later. A lot of 3.x apps can be recompiled to target the 2.0 runtime, but if you're using any of the extensions (WCF, WF, WPF) you always need the full 3.x framework installed.

So no.

Additionally, extended support for Windows 2000, including security updates, ends in a little over 13 months. If someone wants to keep using Windows 2000 past that date, that's their own business. But the implications to you are from that date on you can't ever know for sure whether there's really a problem that you can actually resolve or if your customer's server was just infected with malware. Offering support in that scenario is difficult at best.