Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework Beta 2 available on Wednesday

This blog has been abandoned for the longest time :-$ but I’ve got great news to try and re-inaugurate it (again): it’s just been announced that beta 2 for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will be available the day after tomorrow, i.e. on October 21st; moreover, we now have a firm date for the launch of the final versions of these products: March 22nd 2010. There is a lot of cool stuff in the new versions of Visual Studio and .NET Framework but my personal favorites (at least for the time being :-) are:

1. The inclusion of dynamic programming elements in C# and other framework languages. Good things from languages like Python, Groovy, or Ruby are now an integral part of C#.
2. The inclusion of F# as a first level language of the .NET Framework, welcome functional programming to the most popular commercial development platform on the planet!
3. A new version of Entity Framework, making the oficial .NET ORM tool more flexible and adequate. Less and less, we’ll need to code SQL by hand and laboriously move data from tables to objects and viceversa.

As I said, there’s a lot of cool stuff in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4, but I plan to start using those three things as soon as possible in customer projects, after all, to have success stories by March 2010, we have to start working before this year ends.