Today, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2010 and .Net FX 4 Beta 1. This is available to the MSDN subscribers only. Don’t loose heart. It will be available to everybody on Wednesday.

.Net Framework 4.0 will provide the second generation of WCF and WWF. Together, these two technologies integrates naturally. This will allow developers to better model complex communication patterns in a full declarative language (XAML).

New Features of WCF:

1. Representational state transfer (REST) enhancements
   1. Simplified building of RESTful services
   2. Templates to accelerate building Singleton & Collection Services, Atom Feed and Publishing Protocol Services, and HTTP Plain XML Services
2. Messaging enhancements
   1. Protocols: WS-Discovery, WS-I BP 1.2
   2. Duplex durable messaging
3. Correlation enhancements
   1. Content- and context-driven, one-way support
4. Declarative workflow services
   1. Seamless integration between Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation and unified Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) model
   2. Ability to build an entire application in XAML, from presentation to data to services to workflow

New Features of WWF:

1. Significant improvements in performance and scalability
   1. Performance gains in all aspects of Windows Workflow Foundation at design time and runtime
   2. At least a tenfold improvement in performance
   3. Improvements in serialization performance and size needs
2. New workflow flow-control models and prebuilt activities
   1. New flowchart control model
   2. Expanded built-in activities: Windows PowerShell, database, messaging, etc.
3. Enhancements in workflow modeling
   1. Persistence control, transaction flow, compensation support, data binding and variable/argument scoping
4. Updated visual designer
   1. Easier to use by end users
   2. Easier to rehost by independent software vendors (ISVs)
   3. Ability to debug XAML

Other features in Version 4 includes:

• Parallel Extensions to improve support for parallel computing, which target multi-core or distributed systems.
• New technology called PLINQ (Parallel LINQ),  a parallel implementation of the LINQ engine,  for parallel computing.
• Task Parallel Library  which exposes parallel constructs via method calls.
• Full support for IronPython, IronRuby, and new language F#.
• Oslo modelling platform, along with the M programming language.
• Event Tracing for Windows

To get the latest updates, keep watching Microsoft .Net Framework Page.

Related Links:

1. Comprehensive summary of all versions on .Net Framework
2. Dario F spent a few hours on Visual Studio 2010/.Net Framework 4.0
3. MSDN Page for .Net Framework 4.0 Beta 1
4. MSDN Page for Visual Studio 2010
5. WPF for .Net Framework 4.0
6. WPF Blog

Download .Net Framework 4

You can download .Net Framework FX 4 Beta 1 from here. Download is available to the MSDN subscribers only. The link mentioned here required you to login into the MSDN Site. Soma says that MSDN non-subscribers can download the Framework 4.0 on Wednesday.

1 Comment

• Ajay said Thursday, November 12, 2009 5:24:03 AM

  Thanx for sharing this useful info. Great help. Keep blogging...!