Updated Async CTP

Stephen Toub - MSFT

In April, we released the Async CTP Refresh, and since then we’ve seen fantastic adoption of the technology.  We’ve also seen the technology landscape evolve.  Windows Phone 7.5, aka “Mango”, was released.  Silverlight 5 has had both a Beta and an RC release.  And there have been multiple patches to Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.  All of these have led to some issues with the Async CTP, which many users have run into and let us know about on the forums.

1. Some Visual Studio and .NET Framework patches have prevented some of you from installing the Async CTP Refresh, and they’ve even prevented some of you that already have the Async CTP installed from continuing to use it successfully.
2. Windows Phone 7.1 SDK enables the development of “background agents“.  However, these agents are restricted from referencing certain DLLs, some of which the AsyncCtpLibrary_Phone.dll happened to reference.  That meant you couldn’t use the Async CTP in the development of such agents.
3. Silverlight 5 now includes Tasks. And while that’s awesome, it also means that there’s then a conflict between the Task implementation included in Silverlight 5 and the Task implementation included in the CTP’s AsyncCtpLibrary_Silverlight.dll, which makes it very challenging to use AsyncCtpLibrary_Silverlight.dll with Silverlight 5.

To address all of these problems, we’ve just released v3 of the Async CTP.  The installer has been tested with all known Visual Studio and .NET Framework patches.  The AsyncCtpLibrary_Phone.dll has had the bad references removed so that it may be used to develop background agents.  And the CTP includes a new AsyncCtpLibrary_Silverlight5.dll, which may be used with Silverlight 5 RC (AsyncCtpLibrary_Silverlight.dll is still included and may be used for apps using Silverlight 4).

(Especially for those of you that previously installed the Async CTP and that are planning to install the update, Lucian Wischik has some good information on his blog about handling common installation problems.)

Enjoy!

Stephen Toub - MSFT Partner Software Engineer, .NET

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