dot.net/downloads feedback: ".NET Runtime" missing next to ".NET SDK"

[kasperk81]

@X-Celcius from https://github.com/dotnet/installer/issues/11040#issuecomment-1824355896

goto https://dot.net/downloads which looks like

there should be a link to .NET Runtime option as well pointing to this existing page: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/8.0/runtime

[X-Celcius]

I'll add some reasoning to this: Not all of us do DevOps and automatically deploy webservices to some cloud server or have experts that handle the installation. Some (many?) still develop WinForms / WPF .NET applications that the end-user needs to install. This is still a perfectly valid use-case for .NET. I know that we can bundle the runtime with the application but when it comes to security patches or bundle file size this is not always the best option, especially when your software consists of multiple applications which all use the same runtime.

Plus I've always wondered why this more end-user-friendly runtime download page exists when there is no way to navigate there. Going to https://dot.net doesn't mention the word "runtime" anywhere, it's like this page is made for developers only. And yes, many end-users don't even know what .NET is at all but there are also people in between, for example helpdesk / consulting who manually install software and it's cumbersome to google for some obscure download links when instead they could just go to dot.net and download the latest runtime. Easy to remember and OS / platform independent.

[rzikm]

@NikolaMilosavljevic, Can you please have a look? While not directly installer issue, I can't think of anyone better to tag.

[mairaw]

We used to have the runtime download link on the main download page, but we'd get a lot of non-experienced users confused about the several options we used to show. We'll try to show only one link unless we can't detect which architecture is your machine. e.g. Before we used to show all three flavors of Windows downloads for example

The SDK includes the runtime, so we thought that was the better option to show as a default one with a link for more options. We haven't redesigned https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/8.0/runtime and https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/8.0 yet, but we intend to make those easier as well. But I'll log an issue on our repo too (private) to see if there's anything we can do here to surface that link without introducing the confusion back.

[X-Celcius]

Thanks for the explanation, makes sense. Just a thought: You chose to offer the SDK as the default to make downloading easier for users. This includes all three flavors + development tools and has been a viable option, even if it did include stuff that a pure runtime user didn't need. Why not bundle all three flavors of the runtime in a single package similar to the SDK? Splitting up the runtime makes sense when bundling alongside an application but when installing .NET as a standalone runtime on a target computer you would expect the whole runtime to be present, not just parts of it. It's surely a little more involved than that but if it was fine to download the full SDK until now, it can't be worse to install all three runtimes even if you just need one.

Maybe this would be less of an issue if the docs give clear guidance on how to distribute the runtime to end-users (Website, winget, self-contained, etc.). This article compares the pros and cons of how to publish an app but it doesn't mention the easiest ways for the user to actually get the runtime.

[mairaw]

Thank you for your feedback. We'll evaluate ur options. But the SDK doesn't include all three flavors - we just changed the website logic to offer the one we detect based on information we can get from the browser information. If we can't detect that information, we still show three buttons for Windows, for example. But if you're looking for a different flavor than your machine, you still have to open all versions to download the desired file.

[X-Celcius]

Maybe this was a misunderstanding on my part, when talking about flavors I was talking about Core, Desktop and ASP.NET. Since there is only one type of SDK to download I guess you were talking about the architecture (x86, x64, arm). What I wanted to emphasize is that downloading the SDK gives you Core, Desktop and ASP.NET runtimes plus SDK so packaging these 3 runtimes minus SDK into a single download package and offering this as the default download wouldn't make matters worse for the non-development end-user.

[kasperk81]

a checkbox to start a dimension

out of 615M of installed arm64 package, size of sdk is 419M. it should be optional

fancy checkbox https://jsfiddle.net/2yvLequ7/

[mairaw]

I'd have to take you to the runtime download page for you to choose the runtime. But we'll discuss options!