Yesterday I blogged about a problem ISV's can run into when they are selling .NET class libraries compiled with Visual Studio.NET 2003 to customers using Visual Studio.NET 2002. Today I've found a solution, which seems to be used by other ISV's already, and which solves the problem which caused me to post my rant yesterday.
To read the complete article, click here
I haven't played with it, but presumably couldn't publisher policy etc be of some use here?
At the very least, the end user could use the .config files to redirect 1.1 assembly references to a 1.0. Sure, it's not ideal, because the customer does have to make changes, but at least it doesn't require multiple versions of the end product.
Then again, I guess technically using a publisher policy isn't much different than referencing the 1.0 assemblies explicitly.
Ideally, these config files would allow you to specify "compatible" versions - that is, not just a redirect, but telling the runtime to "feel free to use any one of these versions, they're all the same to me".