What's bizarre is that it's easier to create a .NET program that runs on every supported version of Windows without having to worry about installing the prerequ

What's bizarre is that it's easier to create a .NET program that runs on every supported version of Windows without having to worry about installing the prerequisites. Simply compile to .NET 3.0. You can do this even on Visual Studio 2013. The resulting program will run on Windows Vista and Windows 7 without any install. It will also run on Windows 8 and 8.1, which bundle .NET 4, because Windows will automatically install .NET 3.5 when your program attempts to run. This scenario doesn't work for Visual C++ programs. Each new version of Visual C++ ships with a new runtime library, and it's neither bundled nor automatically installed by Windows. In other words, .NET executables are more portable than Visual C++ executables! Talk about bizarre.