The Moth

One of the things you will hear/see a lot in Orcas talks/articles is that the CLR remains at the same version: v2.0.50727. What is meant by that is that a "service pack type" upgrade will be made which is guaranteed not to break any existing code: just bug fixes and maybe some tiny enhancements that can have no negative side effects and in most cases have to be explicitly taken advantage of from newly written code.

So, on your system navigate to your %windir%/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v2.0.50727 directory. Pick any of the DLLs starting with "mscor", e.g. mscorjit.dll, and look at its full version information. Note that the presence of Fx v3.0 has no effect on the scenarios below or to this post as a whole.
1. If you have installed NetFx v2.0 on XP or lower, the revision will be 42 i.e. full version is v2.0.50727.42
2. If you have installed Orcas Beta 1 on your machine the revision is actually 1318.
3. If you are on Vista (which comes with NetFx 2.0 by default) and have *not* installed Orcas, then your revision is 312 (that's right, it is "the same version" as RTM)

So there isn't much point to this post, other than to highlight/reinforce that when we say it is the same version, we do not count the Revision part – just the Major.Minor.Build parts.