Is it OK to write new apps for .NET yet?

Question

I'm about to start a new Windows app. It will be an audio processing tool written in C++. It will need all the usual GUI stuff like menus, toolbars etc. It will also have an embedded web browser.

I'm thinking of building it on .NET but I'd like to hear from you all on whether .NET is still a pain to deploy. What percentage of regular users already have the .NET runtime ? I don't want to cause any pain for my users like having to download a 100MB runtime just to launch my app.

What do you stack overflowers think ? Should I go .NET or should I stick to plain 'ol Win32 API ? Or maybe even a 3rd party system like QT or wxWidgets ?

Answer 1

You can point your users to the .Net bootstrapper, It's a 100kb download that will detect which bits of the .Net framework they currently have and will download anything missing.

There is also http://smallestdotnet.com/ an initiative from @shanselman

Answer 2

I don't know exact numbers, but Vista has .NET built in, and other versions of Windows can get it off of Microsoft Update fairly easily. You can also redistribute the .NET runtime with your application.

I wouldn't worry too much about whether your users have .NET installed.