C# 411 .NET NewsThe Release Candidate (RC) for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 is now available to the public. The biggest change from Beta 2 is a major improvement to Visual Studio performance, specifically as it relates to loading solutions, typing, building and debugging. The RC includes a “go-live license” for companies that wish to deploy Visual Studio 2010 in their production environment.
Download VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 RC
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Do you need help convincing your boss that your company needs to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010? Or perhaps you are looking for additional ammo in your .NET vs. Java religious wars with your programming colleagues?
Microsoft has produced a Silverlight-based “Myth Busting Matrix” for Visual Studio. This nifty web tool details the benefits of upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 and helps dispel some widely-held myths about Visual Studio and the Microsoft .NET Framework. You can browse all three supported versions of Visual Studio (2005, 2008 and 2010) by your areas of interest and click on the myths for more information.
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The second beta version of Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft .NET Framework v4.0 are now available. VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 deliver significant new capabilities and improvements. The Beta 2 release was focused on performance, stability, and the integration of the overall feature set. The development team is awaiting our feedback on the product and preparing for the final release candidate (RC). Beta 2 includes a “go-live” license, which means you can start using these tools for your production projects.
VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 are slated to be released on March 22, 2010.
Download VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 2
More details about Beta 2 from Scott Gu
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The good news is that Microsoft .NET Framework is installed on a majority of Windows PCs. The bad news is if you are developing an application with the newest version of .NET (3.5), nearly half of Windows PCs cannot run your app.
Alexander McCabe has produced a detailed and thoughtful analysis of the penetration of the various versions of Microsoft .NET Framework installed on Windows PCs. As of October 2009, his study shows the following distribution of .NET versions:
| .NET Version | % Installed | % Compatible |
| .NET 3.5 | 52% | 52% |
| .NET 3.0 | 7% | 59% |
| .NET 2.0 | 11% | 70% |
| .NET 1.1 | 8% | 78% |
| .NET 1.0 | 0% | 78% |
| None | 22% | n/a |
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CodePaste.NET is a new public code pasting site that allows you to paste and link code from social network sites like Twitter and Facebook, or chat and IM applications like Skype or Messenger. The idea is that these social networks or chat clients work well for interactive discussion, but they don’t allow enough space to post even the shortest snippets of code for all participants to see.
A lot of Twitter traffic deals with discussions about code or code concepts, so a place to share and view code is very useful. So rather than squeezing code snippets into these clients, you can post it on the the CodePaste.NET site and then link to the snippet. As opposed to other code pasting sites, CodePaste.NET is more specific to .NET developers, providing syntax highlighting and the ability to apply comments on snippets.
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Microsoft is applying its Community Promise to the C# programming language and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). This means that anyone can freely build, sell, distribute or use programs with C# and the CLI without signing a license agreement or otherwise communicating to Microsoft. This applies to all distribution models including open source and GPL. Under the Community Promise, Microsoft will not assert its Necessary Claims.
In other words, build all you want with C# and .NET, Microsoft won’t sue you for copyright or patent infringement.
Specifically, this announcement applies to the ECMA 334 (C#) and ECMA 335 (CLI) specifications.
“The Community Promise is an excellent vehicle and, in this situation, ensures the best balance of interoperability and flexibility for developers,” said Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President for the .NET Developer Platform.
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Documentation for the next generation of the Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is now publicly available at MSDN.
Visual Studio 2010 Docs
.NET Framework 4 Docs
WPF Docs
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Microsoft has just released the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1): Release Candidate (RC).
The Microsoft Windows SDK is a set of tools, code samples, documentation, compilers, headers, and libraries that developers can use to create applications that run on Microsoft Windows operating systems. The Windows SDK combines two formerly separate SDKs: the Platform SDK (PSDK) and the .NET Framework SDK.
The following is a small sampling of what’s new or updated in this SDK:
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Two social networking news sites have emerged for .NET developers: DotNetKicks and the new .NET Shoutout. Both sites provide tons of .NET news and information, if you’re willing to spend the time to dig through it all. But for busy developers, there is a new .NET news site that cuts through all the clutter.
Dot-Net-News.com provides the latest news and information about the Microsoft .NET development environment including C#, Visual Basic and Visual Studio. No fluff, no spam, just the facts, man.
Here are some of the latest .NET news stories:
Subscribe to the feed today to get your steady-stream of .NET news!
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The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) simplifies the creation of extensible applications. MEF offers discovery and composition capabilities that you can leverage to load application extensions.
MEF presents a simple solution for the runtime extensibility problem. Until now, any application that wanted to support a plugin model needed to create its own infrastructure from scratch. Those plugins would often be application-specific and could not be reused across multiple implementations.
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