Yesterday my boss had me upgrade the project files of our main app to use Visual Studio 2008.
While doing this the migration wizard asked if I wanted to upgrade the app to work against the .Net 3.5 framework. He had said to just migrate the solution files for now, and later when there was time we would upgrade the framework version.
Then he asked something I hadn't really thought about.
"Does the .Net 3.5 framework support Windows 2000?"
And its been quite a while since a single question had essentially ruined my day, but this one pretty much had. I guess I should say that it was the "no" that I responded with that really did it, since it meant that it will likely be years until we upgrade it (we officially dropped support for SQL7 around June). The worst part is that not upgrading the framework for the most part the right decision for the company, as many of our existing customers use Windows 2000.
Unlike the 2.0 framework, which because of having our own framework essentially I could only really make use of generics, the new features in 3.5 framework (and inclusion of 3.0) had a lot of promise. However, since most of what I wanted to use it for could be done without it the 3.x features with some extra work, I find myself unable to come up with a strong enough case (though I really wish I could) that would counter act the possible loss of existing customers.
Unfortunately there is one other downside to this decision which, because of the environment that my boss has created, I doubt will come up until it is to late. Might expand on this at a later time, but I really want to get back to playing with the MVC framework right now.