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Comment by insulanian | Hacker News Reader

> You must install an additional DirectX component in order to install the .NET Framework 4.7 on Windows 7 SP1, Windows 2008 R2 SP1, Windows 2012 and Windows 2012 R2. The installation includes a single dll that will get added to your system. It will only be used by WPF applications. It is not possible to install the .NET Framework 4.7 without installing this component.

Why the heck should I be forced to install DirectX on a web server?!

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Presumably because this is the desktop package of .NET runtime? WPF is the GPU-accelerated GUI rendering library, it makes sense that it would have a DirectX dependency. AFAIK it has always had a DirectX dependency, just one that was met by the base install on versions of windows that were supported. I think this is just the first time a .NET upgrade has required/offered upgrading to a newer version of DirectX, instead of just raising the minimum windows version.

Server/embedded/etc headless environments presumably want .NET Core instead, which added most of these updates in version 1.1 a few months back (along with VS 2017).

It's one DLL, required to render the UI components of the framework in a hardware accelerated and optimized fashion. You're not installing .NET Core, you're installing the real framework.

Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.

It would have been a small amount of effort to bundle it with the .net installer. But it is going to create big support issue if you have to tell customers one by one to install DirectX manually. Hope they will resolve this through windows update.

Games have traditionally shipped updated DirectX binaries with their installer, most the time you don't even see DirectX setup anymore. The redistributable files can be deployed almost invisibly.

Yeah but think of a typical .net application. Probably some business application used by a lawyer or a doctor. They don't install DirectX on their machine.

They don't install anything on their machine. They don't even know .NET exists or that the new release requires DirectX.

The developer will modify the installer to include this extra requirement. End.

That's not the bit that concerns me. It's that it's yet another reason for desktops not to update, which is just plain painful for people who develop ClickOnce applications.

Why would it be painfull? ClickOnce is stable and the only dependency is .Net 2.0 ( but you can use higher once off course)

PS. ClickOnce is awesome. A restricted Client ( you can't do everything you want with it), but it can be installed through a browser ( easier for the user) and it automaticly fetches updates ( if set up right, not hard)

Yes, but ClickOnce doesn't install .NET, and if you want to use that (and, for instance, a modern TLS stack) you need people to upgrade.

Windows Server has most of the client stuff... Server Nano, without that much legacy, can only run .NET Core.

Who said you need install DirectX? They said you need install single dll. No big deal.

So, twice as many pretequisits to install a regular .NET app?

there are a lot of windows server applications that needs to be running inside a user session and can't run as a service. so you have a graphical window anyway ^_^

I would suspect that increasingly the push is going to be on to emphasize DotNet Core for server-side work.

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