.NET FX 4
As a part of the conversation on the VS2010 and .NET FX 4 pillars, I thought I would focus today on the .NET platform.
With .NET FX 4, we are focusing on empowering innovative user experiences in applications, allowing for re-invigorating large ISV applications, enabling developers to create connected and declarative applications, and enabling developers to build next generation line of business (LOB) applications.
We know that user experience is becoming critical for LOB applications. In WPF4, we are adding support for the Windows7 multi-touch, ribbon controls, and taskbar extensibility features. The Surface 2.0 SDK will also be built on WPF 4 and share a common multi-touch infrastructure and programming model. We are adding a Data Grid control that will significantly improve your experience when building data centric applications. We are also addressing some of the fundamentals with even better deployment, continuing improvements in performance and scalability, visual improvements such as text clarity and layout pixel snapping, and improved localization and interoperability.
Large ISV applications can easily take advantage of the user experience inherent to WPF and the improvements to it in WFP4. We understand firsthand what it means to re-skin a large native application and take advantage of the incredible UI you can get from WPF. For Visual Studio 2010, we have taken Visual Studio and started to transform the UI in this very way. You won’t see this happen throughout the entire IDE in this next version however, but we are taking all new pieces of UI that are being written and using WPF as well as taking a bet in some of our larger UI infrastructure pieces. As I mentioned earlier this week in a post, we have a new editor that is written exclusively in WPF and built on MEF and .NET FX 4. Our start page is new, clean, and simple and is also WPF based as is our overall shell. This work has driven some improvements in WPF and the new WPF controls will strengthen your ability to re-skin your application with WPF while leaving the business logic intact.
Another area we are focusing on is to make your life easier for n-tier development. N-tier development is a reality in the business world today - application patterns such as those in Silverlight and Ajax make n-tier mainstream. In .NET FX 4, We are making n-tier development much easier by doing all the plumbing work for you and letting you focus on your business logic while still being explicit about the network transitions. We are providing Visual Studio support for a single solution that spans both the web server and the client tiers with end-to-end solutions around sorting, paging, filtering of data on the client, as well as end-to-end solutions for data validation from declarative data on the database tier all the way through to the client UI. You will be able to write validation logic once – have it run anywhere and this framework will work with any data access layer - the Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL, ADO.NET, nHibernate, etc.
.NET FX 4 also builds on prior investments that we have made in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). The main goal is to enable developers to express applications in a way that makes sense to the team and business, provide a framework for durable, long running apps, and simplify the creation and customization of authoring experiences. WF in .NET FX 4 includes a composable set of workflow styles, a unification of rules and activities as well as improved data binding, scoping, and expression support. In Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) we are simplifying implementing complex communication patterns with content-based message correlation and support for long-running durable communications. We are also adding XAML support for declarative service authoring and improved support for REST service authoring. To improve the developer experience with these technologies, we are improving the tooling in Visual Studio 10 with a new flowchart designer. The new tooling will make it easy to create custom activity UIs leveraging WPF and the new declarative-workflow model will make re-hosting the designers outside of Visual Studio even easier than before.
As you can see, there is a lot of good stuff that we are adding to .NET FX 4.
Namaste!
Comments
Anonymous
November 12, 2008
PingBack from http://www.tmao.info/net-fx-4/Anonymous
November 12, 2008
Soma, the ribbon is currently covered by the bizarre 'Office UI Licence' (which was presumably accidentally excreted in the dying spasms of 'old MS'). Can you reassure us that the absurdity of the OUI licence isn't going to encumber the use of WPF4?Anonymous
November 12, 2008
Hi Willdean, We hear your feedback on the license issues. The .NET FX team is keeping that in mind to ensure you don't encounter these issues with WPF4. -somasegarAnonymous
November 12, 2008
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November 12, 2008
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November 12, 2008
Soma, Thanks for sharing. you mention "...visual improvements such as text clarity and layout pixel snapping". We are currently working on a Silverlight app and the blurry fonts have become a major issue. I am assuming this will be addressed by WPF4. Do you have a rough ETA that we can pass on to our clients? Thanks, TorstenAnonymous
November 12, 2008
Well Soma, This is the most encouraging blog you have "ever" posted. I can't believe you are finally addressing data and n-tier issues in VS. But given Microsoft's history with data access and N-TIER development in VS I'm being rightfully cautiously optimistic especially since data is still I assume being treated as an object and through the .NET framework. I still can't understand why you just wont implement something that has been proven to work for years and provide native data access to SQL Server using the VFP core command and function library? With the DLR this is completely doable. I'm totally baffled by your resistance to the obvious! Nonetheless I'm taking a wait and see approach and eager to play with this technology when it is finally released hopefully it will not be symbolism over substance. MarkAnonymous
November 12, 2008
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November 12, 2008
Hi Torsten, Yes, we are planning on addressing these in WPF4. You will likely see pixel snapping in a beta release and improvements to the blurry font issue at RTM. It is a little too early to talk about an ETA, but as we make more progress on .NET FX4, we will keep you posted. -somasegarAnonymous
November 13, 2008
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November 13, 2008
Basic ability to handle and play audio/video files would be a great addition! I also would like some more clarity on the LINQ to SQL situation. LINQ to SQL should not be abandoned but that’s what it looks like will happen to it from the ADO.NET blog.Anonymous
November 13, 2008
I see the Service Bus in Azure but I don't see any mention of it being part of WCF 4.0. Is there a chance that we'll be able to do pub/sub with a service bus endpoint in WCF 4.0.Anonymous
November 13, 2008
.NET needs improved image file handling also. Doing things that should be simple (see example below) should be simple. Example: Open a jpeg file, set compression level to 50, save as a different jpeg file. Example 2: Open a single page tiff file, open another single page tiff file, each file has the same tiff format (e.g. black and white), create a new tiff file containing 2 pages, one from each of the input files using Group IV compression. Doing either of them is quite difficult to do as the .NET framework currently has poorly designed classes for image file format/parameters. The framework directs you to an undocumented set of generic codec classes which forces you to hunt for the available compression, format, etc settings for each image format in the debugger. This should be easily found in a class derived off of the generic codec class which is specialized to jpeg files, a specialized class for Tiff files, a specialized class for PNG files, a specialized class for bitmap files. These specialized classes should have a set of basic properties (e.g., compression quality level) and a bag of advanced properties where all of the rarely used values reside. See the Java Advanced Imaging classes as well as the Java Media Framework classes for inspiration. Microsoft has the underlying libraries for media and image file handling already built into Expression media and Expression design. Can't they just extract a subset of them and embed them in the .NET API? The Expression encoder should allow for reading of most of the common media formats. Expression design should be able to read/write most of the common image file formats as well as set the parameters for each.Anonymous
November 13, 2008
In WPF, unfortunately there's no way to get the bit rate without using the Media SDK but the NaturalDuration property on MediaElement will return a media file’s duration/runtime and NaturalVideoWidth/NaturalVideoHeight will return a media file’s dimension. We'll look at if we can improve this in the next version. Ian.Anonymous
November 14, 2008
Hi, c't, a popular german computer magazine states that WF will change significantly in .Net4 (see below) so that existing WF applications have to be rewritten completely. Would you please comment on this. Thanks, Martin
http://www.heise.de/ct/08/24/022/ "Den Sprung auf die nächste .NET-Versionsnummer nicht überleben wird die Workflow Foundation (WF) – jedenfalls nicht in der derzeitigen Form: In puncto Performance und Funktionsumfang haben sich mittlerweile so viele Probleme offenbart, dass eine komplette Neuimplementierung notwendig wird; bestehende Workflows und Aktivitäten werden sich damit nicht weiter nutzen lassen."
Anonymous
November 14, 2008
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November 14, 2008
Support for the empowering innovative user experiences in applications, such as Windows 7 multi-touch,Anonymous
November 16, 2008
+1 for finally fixing the blurry text. But, it'd be super-great to have some kind of hotfix for SL2 and WPF apps before this whole new cycle RTMs. (People have been asking for it since before .NET 3.0 RTM!) But wow, it's great to see some official recognition and management of the issue, finally,Anonymous
November 17, 2008
Accroding to S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President Developer Division in his blog posting empowering innovativeAnonymous
November 17, 2008
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November 18, 2008
What about Windows Forms, is this dead in FX4? I have made a large investment in winforms....Anonymous
November 18, 2008
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November 20, 2008
Publicación del inglés original : Miércoles, 12 de noviembre 9:38 PST por Somasegar Como parte de laAnonymous
November 20, 2008
I agree with Greg's comments about being able to more easily work with media files and their metadata. I have to use COM to read the Artist out of a WMA or MP3 file? Personally, I think Microsoft is purposely leaving it in COM/native code because they consider it proprietary and it would be too easy to reverse engineer it if it were implemented in .NET. And speaking of making things more open. Why not include all the source code for the .NET Framework with the IDE? It's getting better as you can now configure VS and step into some of the source, but, it's not all there and other things like Goto Definition don't work. I like .NET, but, Java and IDEs like NetBeans have .NET and Visual Studio beat in this regard.Anonymous
November 25, 2008
Hello Patrick, I am the Group Manager for WinForms. We continue to invest in WinForms for .NET FX 4. This includes the core expectation of maintaining compatibility for applications already written in WinForms, fixing bugs that developers have reported, contributing to overall developer experiences across Visual Studio, as well as perf work and some feature development. Matt GibbsAnonymous
December 01, 2008
Please view these two feedback item on Connect regarding improving WPF below and please review and consider the ideas for updates in the the .NET 4.0 release of WPF- Please update the WPF 4.0 default text Caret width to the “thinner” version used in all other platforms: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=382313 Please add the great features from the “RichTextBox” control to the standard “TextBox” and “ComboBox” controls in .NET 4.0 (Triple Click select, Selection Margin-cursor indent, etc): https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=375044 Thanks for your time. Jason WebbAnonymous
December 01, 2008
One added note: The Caret suggestion feedback I mentioned also allows you to manually adjust the Caret size and bring the older size if you like it better. You'll find this and much more details when you read the actual feedback report. The same goes for the other feedback report... there's much more details when you read the whole thing. If anyone else agrees with these feedback suggestions, feel free to vote and leave comments. Thanks again! Jason Webb (jasonw15@msn.com)Anonymous
December 01, 2008
Jason, I'm a developer on the WPF team. We are tracking the issues you raise, and we hope to address them in a future release. The current caret thickness render, in particular, is a bug that we have been looking at closely. We would also like to see it render thin and crisply. FWIW, it is currently possible to adjust the caret thickness in the "Ease of Access Center" control panel, using "Set the thickness of the blinking cursor" combobox. In this case the setting is desktop global, intended to aid users who have difficultiy viewing a standard thin caret. BenAnonymous
December 04, 2008
Thanks so much. Keep up the great work!! JasonAnonymous
December 07, 2008
Regarding the text improvements...will there also be improvements to scrolling text issues described here: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=445078 For me, this issue is a deal breaker for developing new apps in WPF.Anonymous
December 07, 2008
Just a post so I can watch the thread...ignore.Anonymous
December 08, 2008
Is .NET Framework 4.0 going to be a full release or another additive release like 3.0 and 3.5 are? In other words, when I eventually install 4.0, will there be a C:WindowsMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv4.0CONFIG folder that I would go to to manage my machine.config etc. instead of v2.0.50727? Also, in participating with Connect, there were a lot of bugs that were supposed to be addressed as part of the red bits (or was that green bits?), but never got fixed because of the feature push for .NET 3.0. Are these going to be addressed as well in .NET 4.0?Anonymous
March 13, 2009
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March 11, 2010
Like Bo, I would like to see support for quad (or greater)precision. Even if it is software-only for now.