I'm making a C# application in Visual Studio 2019 that needs to run on Windows 7 (and later versions). At the moment of choosing a template I unknowingly selected the one that only lets me target NET Core 3.1 or NET 5.0, when in the past I would have gone for the older NET Framework 3.5 to ensure that the program would run on older computers.

I understand that NET 5.0 can be installed on W7 but it looks like it requires more dependencies to be installed (potentially confusing my client if they ever decide to install the software on their own), and I've never attempted to run a NET 5.0 application on W7.

Should I stay with NET 5.0 so it's future-proof, or would it be safer to re-target my project to Framework 3.5? How well does NET 5.0 work with W7?

CodePudding user response：

You can publish .NET 5 app as self-contained (see windows RIDs) one so end user will not need to install manually anything extra on the machine.