The changes for .NET 4.5 are now public too

Business as usual then, wcf will never be simple though, it is something that is inherently hard. It looks as if Microsoft are already using asynchronous features in wcf and WPF

No improvements except ASP.net/HTML5. 

The most significant feature of WPF: 'Airspace fix' is NOT READY.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=220956

2.3.9 Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
2.3.9.1 HwndHost redirection does not function correctly

The .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview includes an HwndHost redirection feature. However, this feature has several known issues.

To resolve this issue:

There is no workaround. We recommend that you do not use HwndHost redirection in this prerelease. The feature is still being evaluated and might not be included in the final release of the .NET Framework 4.5.

surely the airspace fix is coming though.. they've been talking about that for ever

now I really need to get on Async.

16 hours ago,ManipUni wrote

No improvements except ASP.net/HTML5. 

Can't agree. There's nice improvements in WPF. Support for static property binding, and a "new" pattern for surfacing property change events for static properties is welcome. The WeakEvent stuff is very nice, and should make using weak events much easier. INotifyDataErrorInfo is an important port from Silverlight. A bit low level, but I've wanted the new BindingExpression stuff for quite a while. The new methods on Dispatcher are minor, but they will vastly improve what calling code looks like. Finally, it's beyond time we have support for markup extensions for events. The last should make the MVVM pattern easier to use with events.

WCF, likewise, has some major new improvements. WebSocket support alone has me intereseted.

The changes for networking are also very welcome and important. HttpClient alone is worth being excited about, even if we've had variations on this available through CodePlex projects for a while.

@wkempf: Access to collections between the UI and background threads looks nice.

@kettch: Yeah, I skipped a few things in WPF because they seem to mostly come down to behind the scenes (mostly) performance improvements. The VirtualizingPanel changes are in this category as well. Nice to have, but not really "new features" for devs to get excited over.

@wkempf: That one jumped off the screen at me, because I've spent a lot of time wrestling with getting objects and collections to traverse that boundary. No matter how many times I do it, it's still hassle.

@magicalclick:Your timing is good - if you watch one of the keynotes (think it was Chris Sells) they go through how easy it is to create a simple XAML app using BING as the data source - then they make a couple of changes and BOOM! the calls o BING are async.

Not saying it's all easy but I think they have done some great work on making async appear to be as straightforward as sync by doing some fancy footwork behind the scenes.

I have a problem in the example provided in walkthrough. Nowhere in the example have used Invoke or BackgroundWorker for updating UI in async methods. Is that mistake or we can finally say that "the runtime will deal with it automagically, so it doesn't matter now."?

EDIT: So these methods are really not needed at all.

Async methods do not require multithreading because an async method does not run on its own thread. It works on the current thread, using time on the thread only when it is active.

I could use this 4.5 on my current project.

There are several fixes in the new version that we suffer from.

Ribbon and IDataErrorInfo being the largest pains.

Hanselman commentary on VS11 and .NET 4.5