What .NET version to choose to avoid installing another framework?

Question

what .NET target framework build should I choose when I don't want to install additional .NET framework versions on Windows XP SP3 / Vista / 7 / 8 / 8.1 / 10?

All of them are delivered with a .NET version.

The reason is this: The majority of my target audience has nearly no experience with computers so the app should work out of the box without the requirement of installing a additional .NET framework.

The .NET version for me doesn't matter because I only use basic stuff that has been in .NET since v. 1.1

Windows XP compatibility is nice to have but optional.

I already thought about making a little stub in C++ that only checks for installed .NET and extracts and starts the correct build. But this is only my fallback solution if there is no other way to do this (Would this work btw.?).

TL;DR: I don't want to have "You need to install .NET X.Y to run this application" pop up for my customers.

Answer 1

As the already linked Wikipedia-Page suggests, there's no general solution for this problem. When you do not want to ship the installer with your application, it won't work out-of-the box on all versions of windows.

XP comes with 1.0 pre-installed, but that is very old and I would avoid still using it, so there an installation of 2, 3 or 4 is necessary. Vista comes with 3.0 pre-installed, but Win 8 and Win 10 only have .NET 4.0 or 4.5 pre-installed. So if you target the 3.0 framework, users of Win 8 or Win 10 need to install the package manually (it's just a few clicks, but they're needed).

XP only supports up to 4.0, any newer frameworks won't install there.