One of the problems with Windows applications is that they can be difficult to install. Besides providing the files, the application may want to change the registry or provide shortcuts. It is also difficult and sometimes impossible to uninstall applications. With .NET, all the code and any information needed to run an application are provided in a collection of files. In order to install an application, you just need to create a directory containing these files, and removing this directory uninstalls the application.

One of the main problems with installing a Windows application is that the installation may overwrite a DLL used by some other application, and overwriting it causes the other application no longer to work. This is because the two applications require different versions of the DLL file. Because in .NET, DLLs can be signed with a public key and a version number, it is possible for the cache of DLLs to have two DLLs with the same name.