October 29, 2008
Microsoft Details VS2010, .NET 4.0
Microsoft gave developers a preview of its upcoming technologies at PDC.
At its Professional Developers Conference yesterday, Microsoft gave a peek at some of the features of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework version 4.0.
Attendees received an advance version of the IDE, which Scott Guthrie, VP of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division, said was built on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). VS2010 will also get better support for writing parallel code, and will include better code visualization tools. Guthrie also said that the new features are built around what Microsoft is calling the Managed Extensibility Framework, which will allow plug-in functionality to be added by third-party developers.
.NET 4.0 will reportedly get WPF enhancements such as multi-touch and Deep Zoom and Dynamic Language Runtime support for C#.
These announcements come on the heels of yesterday's demo, given, by Microsoft VP for Windows products Steven Sinofsky of some Windows 7 features, including a touch interface for touchscreens and improved on-screen notifications. Sinofsky said Windows 7 will address some of the issues that plagued Vista at its launch, in particular the lack of device driver support. Given that Windows 7 will be based on the same kernel as Vista and Windows Server 2008, the past two years of work that third parties have done to bring their drivers up to date will not be wasted, as those drivers should work in Windows 7 without modification.
