The C# 5.0 beta release is now available

I am super excited to announce that the beta release of Visual Studio version 11 (which includes the .NET CLR version 4.5, Visual Basic version 11 and C# version 5) is available for download right now. As you know if you've been following our CTP releases, in C# and VB we've greatly improved the ease of programming in an asynchronous "continuation-passing" style such that the compilers do the hard work of rearranging the code into a form amenable to asynchrony, so that you don't have to. VB also now has iterator blocks, and has surpassed C# in that VB iterator blocks can even be inside lambdas. Pretty neat.

And that's just the big stuff for C# and VB; there is an enormous amount of new stuff here in the languages, the tools and the runtime. I can't wait to see what developers do with all of these amazing features. Please, download the beta and give us feedback on what you like and what you don't like.

See the following blog posts for more details:

* Jason Zander
* C# Team
* VB Team