Microsoft Net Framework 2
Marie Ota
Guiding product development towards more responsible outcomes
AI systems are the product of many different decisions made by those who develop and deploy them. From system purpose to how people interact with AI systems, we need to proactively guide these decisions toward more beneficial and equitable outcomes. That means keeping people and their goals at the center of system design decisions and respecting enduring values like fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability.
Refining our policy and learning from our product experiences
Over the course of a year, a multidisciplinary group of researchers, engineers, and policy experts crafted the second version of our Responsible AI Standard. It builds on our previous responsible AI efforts, including the first version of the Standard that launched internally in the fall of 2019, as well as the latest research and some important lessons learned from our own product experiences.
The Responsible AI Standard records the pattern we followed to improve our speech-to-text technology. As we continue to roll out the Standard across the company, we expect the Fairness Goals and Requirements identified in it will help us get ahead of potential fairness harms.
Our review of this technology through our Responsible AI program, including the Sensitive Uses review process required by the Responsible AI Standard, led us to adopt a layered control framework: we restricted customer access to the service, ensured acceptable use cases were proactively defined and communicated through a Transparency Note and Code of Conduct, and established technical guardrails to help ensure the active participation of the speaker when creating a synthetic voice. Through these and other controls, we helped protect against misuse, while maintaining beneficial uses of the technology.
Building upon what we learned from Custom Neural Voice, we will apply similar controls to our facial recognition services. After a transition period for existing customers, we are limiting access to these services to managed customers and partners, narrowing the use cases to pre-defined acceptable ones, and leveraging technical controls engineered into the services.
Finally, we recognize that for AI systems to be trustworthy, they need to be appropriate solutions to the problems they are designed to solve. As part of our work to align our Azure Face service to the requirements of the Responsible AI Standard, we are also retiring capabilities that infer emotional states and identity attributes such as gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair, and makeup.
A multidisciplinary, iterative journey
Our updated Responsible AI Standard reflects hundreds of inputs across Microsoft technologies, professions, and geographies. It is a significant step forward for our practice of responsible AI because it is much more actionable and concrete: it sets out practical approaches for identifying, measuring, and mitigating harms ahead of time, and requires teams to adopt controls to secure beneficial uses and guard against misuse. You can learn more about the development of the Standard in this video.
There is a rich and active global dialog about how to create principled and actionable norms to ensure organizations develop and deploy AI responsibly. We have benefited from this discussion and will continue to contribute to it. We believe that industry, academia, civil society, and government need to collaborate to advance the state-of-the-art and learn from one another. Together, we need to answer open research questions, close measurement gaps, and design new practices, patterns, resources, and tools.
Each version of .NET Framework contains the common language runtime (CLR), the base class libraries, and other managed libraries. This article describes the key features of .NET Framework by version, provides information about the underlying CLR versions and associated development environments, and identifies the versions that are installed by the Windows operating system (OS).
.NET Framework is serviced monthly with security and reliability bug fixes. .NET Framework will continue to be included with Windows, with no plans to remove it. You don't need to migrate your .NET Framework apps, but for new development, use .NET 6 or later.
The CLR is identified by its own version number. The .NET Framework version number is incremented at each release, but the CLR version is not always incremented. For example, .NET Framework 4, 4.5, and later releases include CLR 4, but .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 include CLR 2.0. (There was no version 3 of the CLR.)
The tables that follow summarize .NET Framework version history and correlate each version with Visual Studio, Windows, and Windows Server. Visual Studio supports multi-targeting, so you're not limited to the version of .NET Framework that's listed.
Starting with Visual Studio 2022, Visual Studio no longer includes .NET Framework components for .NET Framework 4.0 - 4.5.1 because these versions are no longer supported. Visual Studio 2022 and later versions can't build apps that target .NET Framework 4.0 through .NET Framework 4.5.1. To continue building these apps, you can use Visual Studio 2019 or an earlier version.
.NET Framework 4.5 is an in-place update that replaces .NET Framework 4 on your computer, and similarly, .NET Framework 4.5.1, 4.5.2, 4.6, 4.6.1, 4.6.2, 4.7, 4.7.1, 4.7.2, and 4.8 are in-place updates to .NET Framework 4.5. In-place update means that they use the same runtime version, but the assembly versions are updated and include new types and members. After you install one of these updates, your .NET Framework 4, .NET Framework 4.5, .NET Framework 4.6, or .NET Framework 4.7 apps should continue to run without requiring recompilation. However, the reverse is not true. We do not recommend running apps that target a later version of .NET Framework on an earlier version. For example, we do not recommend that you run an app the targets .NET Framework 4.6 on .NET Framework 4.5.
In Visual Studio, you can choose .NET Framework 4.5.1 as the target framework for a project to compile it as a .NET Framework 4.5.1 assembly or executable. Only run this assembly or executable on computers that have .NET Framework 4.5.1 or later installed. An executable that targets .NET Framework 4.5.1 will be blocked from running on a computer that only has an earlier version of .NET Framework, such as .NET Framework 4.5, installed. The user will be prompted to install .NET Framework 4.5.1. In addition, .NET Framework 4.5.1 assemblies should not be called from an app that targets an earlier version of .NET Framework, such as .NET Framework 4.5.
.NET Framework 4.5.1 and .NET Framework 4.5 are used here only as examples. The principle described applies to any app that targets a later version of .NET Framework than the one installed on the system on which it's running.
Some changes in .NET Framework may require changes to your app code; see Application Compatibility before you run your existing apps with .NET Framework 4.5 or later versions. For more information about installing the current version, see Install the .NET Framework for developers. For information about support for the .NET Framework, see .NET Framework official support policy on the .NET website.
For information about determining which versions or updates are installed on a computer, see How to: Determine Which .NET Framework Versions Are Installed and How to: Determine Which .NET Framework Updates Are Installed.
You can install .NET Framework 4.8.1 from our .NET Framework Download site. For building applications targeting .NET Framework 4.8.1, you can download the NET Framework 4.8.1 Developer Pack. If you just want the runtime, you can use either:
.NET Framework 4.8.1 includes native support for the Arm64 architecture (Windows 11+) and accessibility improvements as well as other improvements. You can see the complete list of improvements in the .NET Framework 4.8.1 release notes.
.NET Framework 4.8.1 adds native Arm64 support to the .NET Framework family. So, your investments in the vast ecosystem of .NET Framework apps and libraries can now leverage the benefits of running workloads natively on Arm64 for better performance when compared to running x64 code emulated on Arm64.
In this release, both Windows Forms and WPF have made improvements to the handling of tooltips to enable them to be more accessible. In both cases, tooltips now comply with the guidelines setforth in the WCAG2.1 content on Hover or Focus guidance. The requirements for tooltips require the following:
In WinForms, this support is only available on Windows 11 or higher operating system. WinForms is a thin managed wrapper around the Windows API, and the new tooltip behavior only became available in Windows 11. WPF has no operating system version dependencies for their accessible tooltips.
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