Orcas October CTP Now Available [Justin Van Patten]

  • Article

The Orcas October CTP became available for download earlier this week.  This CTP contains a couple new features from the BCL team:

  • A new high performance set collection.

    HashSet is a new generic collection that has been added to the System.Collections.Generic namespace. It is an unordered collection that contains unique elements. In addition to the standard collection operations, HashSet provides standard set operations such as union, intersection, and symmetric difference.

  • New IO types that expose almost all pipe functionality provided by Windows.

    Pipes can be used to achieve inter-process communication (IPC) between any process running on the same machine, or on any other windows machine within a network. We've added managed support for both anonymous pipes and named pipes. Anyone familiar with streams should be comfortable using these new APIs to achieve IPC.

We'd love to get your feedback on these new features.  Download the CTP and let us know what you think.

We'll be blogging more about these new features going forward, including starter guides and design notes, so stay tuned!

Update: These new types are in System.Core.dll.  HashSet is in System.Collections.Generic and the pipe types are in System.IO.  Note: we'll probably be moving the pipe types to System.IO.Pipes for the next CTP.