I stumbled upon this announcement from Microsoft today :  the first release of .NET Native.

Basically, .Net Native allows compilation of c#/.Net source code to native binaries. The obvious interest is :

• a performance gain (ex : Windows Store apps start up to 60% faster)
• a smaller memory footprint
• all this while keeping the increased productivity that C# and .Net offer

These are great advantages, but there’s another one which is really interesting : no more dependency on the version of the installed .Net framework. One can develop for the latest version of .Net without requiring users to upgrade their current version of the framework.