What's the real benefit of .NET 4 Client Profile?

Question

We have just upgraded our existing .NET application to compile against .NET 4.0. Our app is a WPF client app that gets installed on end user's machines, so it seems like a natural fit to use the Client Profile. However, we would have to do some reorganization of the code to make this work (some of our code is shared between the client app and different server apps, so we have an indirect dependency on System.Web).

My question is, what benefit would we gain from doing this work?

• Is .NET 4 Client Profile already installed on more machines than .NET 4 full? I understand that Client Profile is rolled out with Windows Update, but I have been unable to find any actual statistics about their respective install bases.

• Is Client Profile faster/less buggy to install? 41MB vs. 48MB install size isn't much difference for me since our app has about 1GB of multimedia resources.

• Are there other benefits to Client Profile that I'm not thinking of?

Thanks for any responses!

Answer 1

The primary case for the client profile is that it's a smaller install and thus more broadly palatable in areas with slow or expensive internet connections, especially when installing from the internet.

If you have a controlled customer base or a well-connected customer base, I doubt it would be worth the cost to eliminate your dependency. If, on the other hand, you want an application that will be more broadly available to more users, it may be worth targeting the client profile.