Announcing Portable Library Tools 2 Beta for Visual Studio 2010 [Mircea]

Today we are announcing the Beta release of the Portable Library Tools 2 for Visual Studio 2010. This is an update to the first version we released in June 2011. It brings parity with Portable Library Tools in Visual Studio 11 Beta for those platforms supported by Visual Studio 2010. It also adds support for building portable libraries targeting more recent platforms, scoped to those features supported by Visual Studio 2010.

Portable Library Tools allow you to create C# and Visual Basic libraries that may be reused, without recompilation, from .NET projects for a variety of different platforms.

Download the Portable Library Tools Beta 2 today! (requires Visual Studio 2010 SP1)

What’s new?

New Supported APIs

Since the release of the initial CTP, we have received numerous requests for more API feature areas to be supported by the Portable Library Tools. In response to your feedback, we have been able to add support for a number of new feature areas for this release. Here is a summary of what Beta 2 supports, highlighting the additions:

Feature Area

Silverlight

Windows Phone

Metro Style Apps

.NET Framework

XBOX 360

 

4

5

7

7.1

4

4.0.3

4.5

Core BCL

Core XML

LINQ

 

IQueryable

 

 

dynamic  keyword support

 

 

 

 

 

Core WCF

 

Core Networking

 

View Models

 

 

 

Data Annotations

 

 

 

 

XLINQ

 

MEF

 

 

 

Data Contract Serialization

 

XML Serialization

 

JSon Serialization

 

System.Numerics

 

 

 

User interface changes

To accommodate for the increased number of platforms and versions supported, we have updated the target platform selection dialog.

The workflow for creating a Portable Library changed slightly, as well. As before, you create a new portable library project by selecting the “Portable Library” template:

However, upon clicking the OK button, you are now prompted with a dialog to select the platforms to target:

The check boxes allow you to enable or disable support for a given platform, while the dropdowns allow you to select the minimum version of that platform you wish to support.

The platform selection dialog is still available In the project property pane after the project is created by clicking the “Change…” button:

In conclusion...

Please let us know what you think - we’d love to hear your feedback!