What are the factors involved in deciding on .NET framework version?

Question

My title sums it up. I have a simple Line of Business application that I will be developing and am curious how to go about determining which version of .NET I should target. Support for Win XP SP3 would be nice, but not necessary. It is going to be used to index multi-page tiffs, so import a batch of tiffs, then index them in a database. Users can then conduct simple searches to find those tiffs.

What do most developers look at when trying to determine the .NET framework they will target for a new application like this? Do I just target 4.5 since it's newest or highest version that supports what I need?

Answer 1

Its always better to target(if you have the budget) the latest version of .NET as in a couple of years, its gonna be the old version :). The latest version will have new libraries and new methods and properties which will make coding easy for you.