I’ve had a comment that my previous post explaining how to install .NET 3.5 in Windows 2000 wasn’t very clear, so I’ll try to clarify it a little…
First of all, let me explain how it works. .NET is actualy 2 separate things. There is the .NET runtime, which deals with interpreting the MSIL intermediate code and executing it. There is also the .NET Framework, which are all the libraries containing the classes that you usually code with in .NET.
In theory, the .NET runtime can be used without the .NET framework (although you’d probably need a couple of DLLs to define things like the basic types). You could use an entirely different framework which sits on top of the same runtime and is compiled to MSIL. I’m not aware of any that exist though.
The really interesting bit is that there are actually only 3 versions of the .NET runtime – 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0. 1.0 and 1.1 are used for the corresponding framework versions, but 2.0 is used for running framework 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5.
In fact, in terms of the framework, 3.0 is 2.0 plus some extra stuff, and 3.5 is 3.0 plus extra stuff. The trick which I rely on is that you can install 2.0 in Windows 2000 and just add the extra stuff that you need.
For my purposes, all I needed was support for Linq and Linq to SQL and a few other bits and bobs. All this is available in .NET Assembly DLL files. you just need to make sure that the assemblies are available to be loaded by the application you are running.
You also need to make sure that you have any prerequisites for those assemblies, because a lot of them will access classes in other assemblies. There are 2 ways of dealing with that. You can either copy in the entire set of DLLs, or you can keep running your program and looking to see what assembly it can’t find when it throws an exception, copying that DLL in and re-running it until you don’t get any more exceptions.
There are 2 ways of making the assemblies available to your program. You can either register them in the GAC so that they can be accessed from anywhere (I’ve not tried this and I probably wouldn’t recommend it – if you want to know how to do this, google installing an assembly in the GAC), or you can just copy them into the application folder that your EXE sits in (or bin folder on your ASP.NET website will probably work too). This does make for a lot of files in that folder, but it works!
You should be able to find the .NET 3.5 assemblies in a folder on a PC that has .NET 3.5 installed under
Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5
nb. Make sure that you have Windows 2000 SP4 and .NET framework 2.0 SP1 installed on the Windows 2000 PC! You might also need to install KB 835732 before .NET 2.0 SP1.