Introducing .NET Framework 4.5

Brandon Bray

September 21st, 20110 0

Update (2017): See .NET Framework Releases to learn about newer releases. This release is now unsupported.

Last week at the BUILD conference, we had the pleasure of announcing the next version of the .NET Framework and releasing a developer preview at the same time. We have so many new things in .NET 4.5 to discuss with our developer community – we’re excited to have this opportunity to begin a discussion about each of them.

At the BUILD conference, many talks provided a glimpse of what .NET 4.5 has to offer. These are some of our favorite talks:

The .NET platform is crucial to so many developers’ day to day lives. We’ve been working for the past two years to build the best platform yet. We started the last release by listening to what customer’s wanted, and worked hard to make improvements where we could while supporting important new Microsoft releases like Windows 8. Over this release, a few themes drove a lot of our decisions:

First class support for writing Metro style applications with .NET
Improve performance with little to no effort from application developers
Write code more easily for data access and web services
Make it possible to write portable libraries across platforms, and support a new processor
Address many top developer requests for .NET APIs and tools

We want to dive into each of these areas. Blogging allows us to have a two-way discussion about the data and considerations that went into the design-decisions. We’re very excited to talk about what we’ve been building.

Who are we

Together, Layla Driscoll and I will be your hosts on this blog series as we tour what you can expect from .NET 4.5. We’ll invite others from across all the .NET teams to give an inside look at the features and scenarios now available in the preview. While we both are on the CLR team, together we have driven a great deal of the planning and experiences for this release of .NET.

It doesn’t take long before developers see how much .NET has to offer. That’s because so many teams from all over Microsoft contribute to the framework. We have much to share, and we’ll do our best to bring the work of many teams into the discussion. All of the posts will be written by engineers on the .NET team.

Starting a new discussion

Keeping a line of discussion open with the developer community is a critical factor in how we make decisions for the .NET Framework. That’s one of the reasons why we keep the Connect site open for suggestions and bug submissions year round. Then we recently joined UserVoice to give the community a way to vote on requests and wishes important to you. Lastly, the MSDN Forums give the community a place to ask questions and provide answers.

Here on the .NET blog, we hope to spark new discussions about specific work. We want to share with you the context and decisions that went into the features and scenarios we built. We hope that the community will share their opinions and participate in helping us make this an outstanding developer product. Admittedly, we’ll make mistakes and we’ll recognize when we do. We’ll work hard to make the conversation constructive and learn from what you all have to say.

We do want comments, and many of us on the .NET teams will be watching. Like other Microsoft blogs, we hope to see in comments:

On topic discussions about .NET and the posts on this site
Respect for everyone in the conversation
Focus on the content of the post; do ask for more details

And please refrain from comments that would be considered abusive (according to the community standard), misrepresentation, repeatedly posting the same comment, or blog-spam.

With that, I want to say thank you for reading and I look forward to joining us in the discussion about .NET.

–Brandon Bray