The good news is that Microsoft .NET Framework is installed on a majority of Windows PCs. The bad news is if you are developing an application with the newest version of .NET (3.5), nearly half of Windows PCs cannot run your app.
Microsoft is applying its Community Promise to the C# programming language and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). This means that anyone can freely build, sell, distribute or use programs with C# and the CLI without signing a license agreement or otherwise communicating to Microsoft. This applies to all distribution models including open source and GPL. Under the Community Promise, Microsoft will not assert its Necessary Claims.
In other words, build all you want with C# and .NET, Microsoft won’t sue you for copyright or patent infringement.
Specifically, this announcement applies to the ECMA 334 (C#) and ECMA 335 (CLI) specifications.
“The Community Promise is an excellent vehicle and, in this situation, ensures the best balance of interoperability and flexibility for developers,” said Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President for the .NET Developer Platform.
Documentation for the next generation of the Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is now publicly available at MSDN.
Microsoft has just released the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1): Release Candidate (RC).
The Microsoft Windows SDK is a set of tools, code samples, documentation, compilers, headers, and libraries that developers can use to create applications that run on Microsoft Windows operating systems. The Windows SDK combines two formerly separate SDKs: the Platform SDK (PSDK) and the .NET Framework SDK.
The following is a small sampling of what’s new or updated in this SDK:
- Documentation – Approximately 80% of the SDK documentation set has been refreshed
- Headers/Libraries – numerous new and updated – please see What’s New in the Windows API under the top-level Getting Started section in the documentation
- Samples – Over 200 new and/or updated samples
- Tools – Several new tools added
- Visual Studio 2008 SP1 C++ command line compiler toolset and matching CRT
Two social networking news sites have emerged for .NET developers: DotNetKicks and the new .NET Shoutout. Both sites provide tons of .NET news and information, if you’re willing to spend the time to dig through it all. But for busy developers, there is a new .NET news site that cuts through all the clutter.
Dot-Net-News.com provides the latest news and information about the Microsoft .NET development environment including C#, Visual Basic and Visual Studio. No fluff, no spam, just the facts, man.
Here are some of the latest .NET news stories:
- .NET RIA Services
- Help Shape the Future of ASP.NET
- ViewModel Tool 3.0
- MVC Contrib v1.0
- Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK 0.5
- IronRuby 0.3
- Microsoft Ajax 4.0 Preview 4
- ASP.NET MVC v1.0 Source
- Silverlight 3 Tools Beta
Subscribe to the feed today to get your steady-stream of .NET news!
NP .NET Profiler Tool is designed to assist in troubleshooting issues such as slow performance, memory related issues, and first chance exceptions in any .NET process. The tool has the following features:
- XCopy deployable: no install or reboot required
- Supports all types of .NET applications
- Generates true callstacks for exceptions, memory allocations, and function calls
- Can monitor a specific namespace to reduce overhead and generate a smaller output file
- Memory profiler reports total number of objects allocated per function
- Custom reports using SQL-like queries
- Wizard-based UI
- Supports all versions of .NET (1.0 , 1.1, 2.0 and 3.5)
- Supports all platforms (x86, x64 and IA64)
- Supports all OSes (Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows 2008 and Vista)
- Support virtual machines
It’s that time of the year to reflect, analyze and compile our lives into a series of Top 10 lists. As with every other Top 10 list, the items on this list and their order are highly subjective. For example, some companies may not care about future versions of .NET — version 2.0 works just fine, thank you. Other companies may need to develop a web application, so Silverlight 2.0 is their top story of the year. So please comment below with your Top 10 List.
Following are the Top 10 stories in 2008 about software development with the Microsoft .NET Framework.
The .NET development team at Microsoft has created a new .NET logo (shown above). Their goal was to create a logo “that was in sync with the key values that we want .NET to stand for: consistency, robustness and great user experiences. The result is a design we refer to as the ‘wave.’ The design is strong, simple and distinctive. The suggestion of the letter ‘N’ in the design will become instantly recognizable over time as shorthand for the .NET brand name.”
Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET framework for Linux, Windows, MacOS and other operating systems. Mono v2.0 was just released and represents a major milestone in the Mono project.
Microsoft announced the next version of its developer platform, which will be named Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Microsoft said VS10 will focus on five key areas (in marketing-speak): riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM).