Microsoft has announced the availability of the next generation of .NET Framework 4.0 CTP, Visual Studio 2010 CTP and the new Windows Azure Tools for VS CTP during PDC 2008.
InfoQ has covered .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 in the past, but new information is coming in from PDC 2008. An important feature to be included in the next .NET Framework and VS 2010 is explicit support for parallelism. S. "Soma" Somasegar, VP of the Developer Division at Microsoft, details:
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 will include programming models for concisely expressing concurrency, including new .NET Framework libraries such as the Task Parallel Library and Parallel LINQ, as well as the Parallel Pattern Library and Concurrency Runtime for developing native applications with C++ that execute efficiently on parallel hardware and parallel profiling and debugging experiences.
VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 have a site of their own on Microsoft Connect. The CTP can be downloaded from Microsoft's Download Center. It's important to notice that VPC SP1 is necessary to run the CTP.
Another important CTP released these days is Windows Azure Tools for VS CTP. Windows Azure is described shortly by Microsoft as following:
The Azure Services Platform is designed to help developers quickly and easily create, deploy, manage, and distribute web services and applications on the Internet. Windows Azure is an operating system for the cloud that serves as the development, run-time, and control environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers on-demand compute & storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.
Windows Azure is elastic, flexible, and interoperable.
InfoQ's Jonathan Allen, present at PDC 2008, has given details on Microsoft's new cloud computing initiative dubbed Windows Azure. The Tools package contains the following:
- C# and VB Project templates for building Cloud Services
- Integration with the Development Fabric and Development Storage services
- Debugging Cloud Service Roles running in the Development Fabric
- Building and packaging of Cloud Service Packages
- Browsing to the Azure Services Developer Portal
- Role configuration
- SSL Certificate selection
Note: Tools for VS require Windows Azure SDK 2008 CTP.