Hello, everyone.

Wednesday August 10 2011 at 13:24, you wrote to Jean Parrot:

 AZ> The good thing is that once they're installed, multiple programs can
 AZ> make use of the same library - in the bad old days, you might have
 AZ> needed multiple copies, one for each program. (And they typically
 AZ> weren't backwards compatible, and there could be conflicts between
 AZ> different versions of the same library, etc etc).

A clarification for those who might not know: if you happen to notice that
your system is installing .NET Framework version 1 updates yet you have the
latest version (4, I believe) installed, that is because many older Windows
programs -require- a specific version of .NET.  From what I am told that is
no longer really needed but some older programs have to have it.

Also, .NET updates aren't always "layered" meaning that the
latest update may or may not build on a previous update.  It's kinda
strange how it's done, but like Alan said, it's best to just have them all
installed and let Windows Update do the management of the .NET libraries
for you.

If you're wondering, DLL stands for "Dynamic Link Libraries".  A
DLL makes it much easier for a programmer to reuse often-used code in a
compact and distributable library so one doesn't have to duplicate code
over and over and over again. 
(An interesting nerd fact: Visual Basic was written by the same team who
developed Microsoft Visual C++ so VB has a heavy dependence on DLLs...and
if you look close enough, VB works like VC++ in several ways. :)

Later,
Sean

... Drilling for oil is boring.
--- GoldED/2 3.0.1