The .NET/Mono Framework has never been a single, unified stack and over the years Microsoft and Novell added several new versions to cover Linux, OS X, and mobile devices. With the introduction of Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11 we can expect one, maybe two more. In an attempt to clear up some of the confusion this article reintroduces all of the major profiles and many of the lessor know ones.
With .NET 4.5 the way you work with the Task class has changed in a subtle but important way.
Leaked information suggests that Microsoft is working on unifying the Windows ecosystem, while Windows Phone 8 will be based on WinRT rather than Windows CE.
Furthering their commitment to ubiquitous access, Windows 8 plans on offering universal password management. Windows 8 credential storage is intended to tie all other usernames names and password into a single account that will travel with the user. And this feature will be usable from all applications.
Microsoft had a great vision for Silverlight, a framework and a set of tools that would dominate the web development landscape, but it fell short of that. There are rumors there won’t be any Silverlight 6. If that happens, how easy is for the Silverlight developer to transition to WinRT? Some numbers show that it is pretty easy.
In anticipation of the upcoming Mono 2.12 public beta, Miguel de Icaza has released the planned feature set including many of the .NET 4.5 APIs and C# 5’s Async support. There is also an improved garbage collector, support for the full table of Unicode surrogate characters, and a new backend for the C# compiler.
.NET 4.5 adds two new collection interfaces, IReadOnlyList and IReadOnlyDictionary. While these interfaces are quite humble on the surface, they expose the rather complex story of backwards compatibility, interoperability, and the role of covariance.
