I was recently reading the comments on my post about VSSP1 coming out and one of my readers, Fred, aptly pointed out that this new service pack includes new service packs for the 2.0 and 3.0 Frameworks as well:
http://blogs.msdn.com/zainnab/archive/2008/08/11/visual-studio-2008-service-pack-1-is-released-rtm-love.aspx
I wanted to make sure folks knew about it because, in my opinion, this is something we really didn't talk about much as it was just sort of taken for granted I think. To that end here is Microsoft's response when asked about the new service packs:
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The following question was raised about .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 and its constituent parts –
“I noticed .NET 3.5 SP1 also contains SP2 for .NET 2.0/3.0. What? SP2 already? Wasn't SP1 delivered in last November? It's hardly 6 months and a new service pack!! I can understand about .NET 3.5 and VS2008 needing an SP1. And still large number of customers have .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 installed and yet no service pack for them? Is there any balance going on here? There are approximately 150 hotfixes after .NET 1.1 Service Pack 1. And there may be hardly 10-15 hotfixes in .NET 2.0/3.0 SP2!!! Please produce a final .NET 1.1 SP2 before it enters extended support from mainstream support. Doesn't Microsoft do any customer userbase surveys? Lots of shops are still on .NET 1.1”
This is a great question and I wanted to reply. First we absolutely realized that there are a number of customers still on .Net Framework 1.1 and we will look into the possibility of servicing it again. I can tell you that the servicing requests on 1.1 are very low and the volume of servicing requests is a big part of what plays into the timing and need for an SP. Which of course leads into your questions of why we are updating the 2.0 bits again which comes down to the fact that to provide a service pack of .Net Framework 3.5 it was necessary to provide fixes in the lower level core parts of the .Net Framework. Given that we needed to update a number of binaries to deliver the 3.5 SP1 we made the decision to go ahead and allow an additional set of fixes into the 2.0 and 3.0 layers. This is a byproduct of the fact that the current set of .Net Framework versions are much like a layer cake with .Net Framework 2.0 at the bottom, then .Net Framework 3.0 and finally the .Net Framework 3.5 layered on top. Each of the upper layers has dependencies into lower layers, but not vice versa. In other words 3.5 can depend on 3.0 and/or 2.0, but 2.0 has no dependencies on 3.0 or 3.5. As you can see this means that some fixes or features in the 3.5 can require updates in their dependant layer to function properly. Also, with the introduction of 3.5 we now allow for the SPs of the .Net Framework to install on both machines with predecessor version or no version at all. This allows customers to not have to deploy two items, the RTM version and its SP, but only the SP.
Thanks,
Larry Sullivan
Group Manager
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