.NET Framework 4.5

Read the full post >> MVPs Joel Semeniuk and David Wesst share what they're excited about in the new version of Visual Studio. Questions? Comments? Share them with myself, the team, and the larger Canadian developer community – start a conversation in the Canadian Developer Connection…

It's been about two years since we last had the chance to discuss changes, improvements and evolution in .NET's base class library (BCL) with some of the folks who write and maintain it. The next version of the BCL will ship as part of .NET 4.5. What's new? What did they focus on for the next…

In the next release of .NET (version 4.5), less disk space will be used to store .NET on your system. In fact, roughly 40% less space than is required today in some cases. This is a significant milestone for .NET. Besides taking up less physical space inside your desktop PC, .NET 4.5 will fit onto…

Bart De Smet has been very busy. As you can imagine, the latest release of Rx (v1.11011.11 (Experimental)) supports the latest (developer preview) .NET version, 4.5. In this release, Bart and company have forged a deeper synergy with the async/await Task-based asynchrony model (see Prefer Async…

Software developer Eric St. John explains the work he and team have done to limit the necessity for reboots during the installation of the .NET Framework version 4.5 (now in Developer Preview mode). It's quite amazing how complex installation can be and the amount of work an installer has…

The Managed Extensibility Framework (or MEF for short) simplifies the creation of extensible applications. MEF offers discovery and composition capabilities that you can leverage to load application extensions. In the upcoming release of .NET 4.5, MEF will ship version 2.0. Recently, I got a chance…

Performance Architect Vance Morrison spends his time isolating and solving performance issues in the .NET framework and Visual Studio, and Vance and team have recently been busy tuning the performance and memory usage characteristics of .NET's upcoming release. Here, we learn about…

The Portable Class Library project enables you to write and build managed assemblies that work on more than one .NET Framework platform. You can create classes that contain code you wish to share across many projects, such as shared business logic, and then reference those classes from different…

Re-JIT is a new capability in CLR 4.5 that allows modification and recompilation of method-level IL code during runtime without requiring a process restart: so, the JIT runs again without shutting down executing applications. This is a great feature for instrumentation and profiling…

Maoni Stephens is the lead developer of the CLR's garbage collector (as you can imagine, she's a native(C/C++) developer). Here, she tells us about background GC for server-side .NET applications and services and also touches on improvements in large heap management, generally in the next…