Jenni Konrad has worked in programming and administration for far longer than she'd like to admit. She's current a software developer specializing in .NET, SQL Server, and Teradata. In her spare time, she enjoys camping, letterpress printing, gardening, and visiting tropical islands as often as possible. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, Matt.
Microsoft announced the new Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 Beta, which will allow developers to use asynchronous programming features in .NET 4 or Silverlight 5 applications. These features were previously provided in the Async CTP, which is now deprecated.
Microsoft has released a list of members and types that are changed or deprecated in .NET Framework 4.5 Beta. They have also provided a guide to help developers migrate applications created with older versions of the .NET Framework.
Microsoft recently announced the Release Candidate of Web Deploy 3.0, their tool for packaging and deploying web applications. The new version includes support for IIS8 on Windows Server 8, PowerShell cmdlets, and automated backup.
Version 2 of Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), a framework for extending .NET applications, is currently in Preview mode, and the final release will be part of .NET Framework 4.5. Expected enhancements in Version 2 include improvements to the RegistrationBuilder API, attribute-less registration, and better control over object lifetime.
Microsoft has announced a new release of EF Power Tools, which provide additional design-time tools for working with Entity Framework. This release introduces the ability to Generate Views and use T4 templates for reverse-engineered code, and includes improved support for Entity Framework 5.
.NET Framework 4.5 Beta not only brings the Async/Await keywords and language simplifications to C# and Visual Basic, but also adds asynchronous methods to several common I/O and data access functions. New asynchronous features are available in ASP.NET 4.5, WCF, and WPF as well.
At this week's VS Live conference, Microsoft announced a new Build Service for Team Foundation Service, the Azure-based version of Team Foundation Server. The build service will automatically compile and run unit tests every time files are checked in.
Version 3.5 of the ORM tool LLBLGen Pro was released this week, and includes updates to Entity Framework and NHibernate functionality, designer improvements, and several updates to the runtime, such as support for OData and SQL Server 2012.
Web Workbench, the extension that brings Sass, LESS, and Coffeescript to Visual Studio, has been updated. This release adds support for Visual Studio 11, improvements to the import process and collapsible outlining for CoffeeScript.
Microsoft's recently-released WMF 3 Beta includes PowerShell 3, in addition to updates to WMI and WinRM. PowerShell 3 introduces several new features, including workflows, a new scripting environment, and performance improvements.
