Rhino 8 Uses the .NET Runtime

Question

Our LAN Zoo hosts both Rhino 7 and Rhino 8 licenses, and our Rhino workstations can get licenses from it. However, Rhino 8 is not working: it fails the connectivity test in the “Set Zoo Server” form.

Answer

On the workstations that can run Rhino 7 but not Rhino 8, try running Rhino 8 with this command-line parameter:

C:\Program Files\Rhino 8\System\Rhino.exe /netfx

If this works, install the .NET Desktop Runtime that your version of Rhino 8 uses on the Rhino workstation (see below).

More Information

Rhino 8 uses the open-source .NET runtime (formerly .NET Core) to run .NET code on both Windows and Mac. Starting with Rhino 8.36, Rhino 8 uses .NET 10. Earlier Rhino 8 releases use .NET 7. This improves performance and aligns the .NET runtimes used across platforms.

On Windows, you can still run Rhino 8 with the .NET Framework runtime if you run into compatibility issues.

.NET lets Rhino and plugins take advantage of many performance improvements that make almost all .NET code run much faster. This can mean large productivity gains with computational libraries or large data sets.

There may be reasons to keep using .NET Framework on Windows, in particular if you use third-party plugins that aren’t yet compatible with .NET. The disadvantage of .NET Framework is that Rhino may run a little slower in some cases.

There are two ways to select the runtime that Rhino 8 uses:

1. Use the SetDotNetRuntime command, then restart Rhino.

2. Pass one of the following command-line parameters when you start Rhino.exe. This overrides the SetDotNetRuntime setting.

If your systems don’t have the .NET Desktop Runtime that Rhino needs, download it here:

• Rhino 8.36 and later: Download .NET Desktop Runtime 10.0
• Earlier Rhino 8 releases: Download .NET Desktop Runtime 7.0