Another idea we've been kicking around recently is plugging a hole with MSBuild and .NET 1.1. As is, VS 2005 only supports building managed applications against .NET 2.0. This means that all managed applications built using VS 2005 require .NET 2.0 as a pre-requisite. This hurts us with ISV's and software vendors that distribute software running on previous versions of .NET. For them to upgrade to Whidbey, they'll need to redistribute .NET 2.0 to their customers or ask their exisitng customers to upgrade. Additionally, Enterprise customers that want to upgrade will need to ensure .NET 2.0 is fully deployed within their infrastructure / environment. As this isn't completely straightforward, and Whidbey cuts them off from targeting the .NET 1.1 runtime, this could slow adoption within our customer base.

Thus, we're considering offering custom MSBuild targets that take converted Everett projects and solutions and allow them to target the .NET 1.1 runtime.

While some people have already offered simple custom targets to solve this problem, there still are major holes in those solutions. For example, we'd like to support COM references; I haven't seen any solutions that handle this. Additionally, there's the opportunity to have command line builds for solutions containing Web References and utilizing the Web Services client stack.

I'm currently researching this idea and estimating interest. If this is something you'dd like to see, please add a comment to this post.