Microsoft's .NET 3.0 Framework was recently released to about a quarter of the fanfare of its older brother, .NET 2.0. Of course, that might be because from everything I've read, 3.0 is just a superset of 2.0 with a bunch of new features for Windows Vista^©. Things everyone needs like:

• Windows Communications Foundation (WCF)
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) - (A/N: We can't forget that WWF is so important to some wildlife fund)
• Windows Cardspace

What these mind-boggling features are exactly for? Who knows. I'd heard some rumors about 3.0, but had not looked into it, because I assumed it was a big upgrade push.

To me a more important question is: If I upgrade to .NET 3.0, and the rest of my co-workers don't will I still be able to work on the same projects as them. Or will they all be forced to go to 3.0?

The documentation (as usual) isn't exactly clear on this, but it does firmly state that .NET 3.0 is not a generational release (i.e. it should actually be .NET 2.1) and that .NET 2.0 applications will run in it.

I nearly had a heart attack when I read that line. Microsoft made a version of their .NET Framework backwards compatible with previous versions! I was dumbfounded and amazed. Of course, there's still no compatibility between 1.0, 1.1. and 2.0.

So back to my important question. I guess I'll just have to upgrade and see if anyone complains. That's basically what happened at my job which made us figure out that .NET 1.0 and 1.1 were not compatible with one another.