.NET Archive

Microsoft officially released the .NET Micro Framework Software Development Kit, today. The new, low-end member of Microsoft's embedded software lineup extends the company's reach into high-volume, cost-sensitive devices and subsystems with severely constrained processor and memory resources.

"One of the highlights of my recent trip to Europe was getting the chance to publicly show off some of the new features in our next release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework (codenamed 'Orcas') for the first time publicly. You can download the deck I presented here . You can also watch a version of the Belgium talk. Orcas is going to be a pretty exciting release, and contains a ton of great functionality that I think you will really love. I'll be drilling down into more details of it over the next few months in many more blog posts."

Microsoft has released to manufacturing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, which features fixes for user-reported issues. Service Pack 1 of the development platform also includes more than 70 improvements for common development scenarios, including new processor support for code generation and profiling, as well as performance and scale improvements in Microsoft's Team Foundation Server.

Matthew David provides a tour of the Windows Presentation Foundation, a feature of .NET 3.0 that simplifies adding 3D, video, data, and vector designs to your applications.

As the final runup to Vista RTM continues, Microsoft has announced that the .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly WinFX) has RTMed and is available on Microsoft Downloads. This is a significant milestone for the Developer Division, and delivers on some of the promises of Windows Vista programmability on earlier platforms.

"Metafiles are one of two fundamental ways of representing an image. While they are not suitable for all images, photographs in particular, they have many advantages over bitmaps for charts and drawings. Peter Aitken demonstrates how to use them in .NET."

"Most developers care about application performance. Even if speed isn't the most important attribute of their software, they certainly don't want the application to be slow. But streamlining code may seem too complex, and require skills that you don't have. Relax. While code optimization certainly is the best way to improve your application's performance, you may be overlooking another option: adjusting the settings on the .NET Framework."

Matthew David introduces the new .NET 3.0 Framework, comparing it to previous releases and pointing out the fancy new features we can look forward to using.

Microsoft has beta-released a developer kit for the .NET Micro Framework, a low-end software platform aimed at deeply embedded applications. The .NET MF extends the advantages of .NET and the Visual Studio toolset into small devices with tight constraints on cost, memory, processor, and/or power consumption, Microsoft says.

Microsoft keeps adding interesting new controls to the Visual Studio toolbox, but John Mueller regrets to report that many developers don't even know that those controls exist. Also, every programmer wants to create applications that are free of bugs. In this article, Peter Aitken explores the debugging tools available in Visual Studio.

Simon and Tim (and team) are working on a programming technology called Software Transactional Memory (STM) which provides an elegant, easy to use language-level abstraction for writing concurrent applications that is based on widely-understood conceptual constructs like Atomic operations (and, well, Transactions...). Simon, Tim and team do all the nasty locking work for you. With STM-enabled languages, you can just concentrate on the algorithms at hand and leave the low-level heavy lifting to the sub-system.

Start learning about an important programming concept, namely objects. The more you work with Visual C#, the more you'll hear about objects. Visual C# 2005 is a true object-oriented language. This chapter isn't going to discuss object-oriented programming in any detail—object-oriented programming is a complex subject and well beyond the scope of this book. Instead, you'll learn about objects in a more general sense.

Windows INI files and its registry have both advantages and limitations, particularly from a developer's viewpoint. In this DevSource article, Peter Aitken explains what they are, and explains how .NET's isolated storage works: it provides a location on your drive that only a specific application can find and use. He explains when isolated storage is a developer's best friend, and when you shouldn't bother.

If you're old enough to remember the 1970s, the current popular fascination with fractals probably flashes you back to those halcyon days of big hair and wild imagery. Whatever your age, you'll enjoy Peter Aitken's explanation of how fractals work. You can even plug in his Visual Studio demo program and make some fractals of your own.