.Net Framework 4 Platform Update 1

Hey everybody, just in case you haven’t heard the good news yet, our group released .Net Framework 4 Platform Update 1 today.  Hurray!

 

By the way, like me you may be confused upon hearing the term ‘platform update’ used this way. What does a .net framework platform update mean today?

Good question.

Normally you receive .Net framework updates in only a few ways, including releases (especially major version number changes, like ‘3.0’), and ‘fixes’, ‘patches’, and ‘QFEs’.

The new releases, like 2.0 to 3.0, or 3.0 to 3.5, have typically contained new features. The ‘fixes’, ‘patches’, or ‘QFEs’ have been for fixing bugs.

A Platform Update breaks that tradition, and is basically a set of new features for .net 4.0 - while leaving the version name fixed at ‘.net 4.0’.

The actual announcement and installation process is explained in more detail here on the endpoint blog.

Once you have everything installed, then inside VS you can choose for your solution to target .net 4.0 with or without the update. This is also explained on the endpoint blog.

So, what’s in it?

  • Yes, it has State Machine. It also has some Azure support improvements, including updated SQL scripts for workflow instance stores.
  • Compensation extensibility
  • No, it does not have C# expressions or anything like that.

And that’s all I know right now. Smile