Why .NET 4.5 doesn't have a Client Profile

Nick Bryans's comment on my previous Blog post .NET Client Profile Vs. .NET Framework was a good one and valid. In this post I will explain why .NET 4.5 doesn't support and what is the benefit .NET 3.5 and .NET4.0 provides with their supported Client Profile flavor.

As we all know there are many type of applications and hence what is required by one application may not be necessarily required by other type of application. For example, System.Web is only used by ASP .NET / Web apps, this is of no use for Windows Forms app.

Now if you think from a deployment's point of view, you would want your installer to be as optimized and small as possible, so it takes minimum and required on the client machine, and this can be achieved by Client Profile flavor of.NET 3.5 and 4.0.

Let's see how Microsoft made .NET Client Profile.
Microsoft removed ASP .NET, MSBuild, Advanced WCF and Data support for Oracle to cut the framework into smaller and optimized footprint.

.NET 4.5 is already optimized and tuned for quicker deployment and takes small disk space. Hence, no more .NET 4.5 Client Profile.