I'm not really disagreeing with you - C# is later, has the benefit of Java being in its hindsight. I don't know how Java does it, but .Net installs framework v

I'm not really disagreeing with you - C# is later, has the benefit of Java being in its hindsight. I don't know how Java does it, but .Net installs framework versions side by side (typically under C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework) so changes to, say V3.0 don't affect apps that run on framework 2.0 at all. Thus breaking backward compatibility for anyone (small or large installed base, doesn't matter) is not an issue when rolling out a new framework version.