The Moth

With Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 some (good) changes were made to the location and versions of the .NET 3.5 assemblies, which previously were quite inconsistent (two additions were also made and I updated the previous post with those).

The .NET folder under Windows (C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\) does not include a build number in its name now, it is just "v3.5" (with Beta 1 it was "v3.5.20404"). If you had explicit references to that location (e.g. in code, config files etc) you will have to change them.

The file versions of the v3.5 assemblies is now 3.5 (that was not the case previously for all of them). They still differ slightly between them on the build number but at least most[1] of them are now in the same place and you can see that in the following partial screenshot of "c:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5\"


Now with Beta 2, the assembly version numbers are more consistent with each other (and different to the file versions of course). You can see those using your favourite disassembler, or simply via the VS references dialog:


As a reminder, to understand what each one of these assemblies offers, see my blog entry on the green bits.

[1] In the 3rd paragraph above I wrote "mostly" because there is one assembly that is not in that same place: System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.dll is one level up in the folder hierarchy (!). So to reference this one you have to browse explicitly to that path from the VS references dialog. Its file version number is consistent with the rest (3.5.20706.1) and its assembly version is 3.5.0.0