Microsoft started development on the
.NET Framework
in the late 1990s originally under the name of Next Generation Windows
Services (NGWS). By late 2000 the first beta versions of .NET 1.0 were
released.
[1]
Version 3.0 of the .NET Framework is included with
Windows Server 2008 and
Windows Vista. Version 3.5 is included with
Windows 7, and can also be installed on
Windows XP and the
Windows Server 2003 family of operating systems.
[2] On 12 April 2010, .NET Framework 4 was released alongside
Visual Studio 2010.
The .NET Framework family also includes two versions for
mobile or
embedded device use. A reduced version of the framework, the
.NET Compact Framework, is available on
Windows CE platforms, including
Windows Mobile devices such as
smartphones. Additionally, the
.NET Micro Framework is targeted at severely resource-constrained devices.
History
Microsoft announced the intention to ship .NET Framework 4 on 29 September 2008. The
Public Beta was released on 20 May 2009.
[16]
On 28 July 2009, a
second release of the .NET Framework 4 beta was made available with experimental
software transactional memory support.
[17] This functionality is not available in the final version of the framework.
On 19 October 2009, Microsoft released Beta 2 of the .NET Framework 4.
[18] At the same time, Microsoft announced the expected launch date for .NET Framework 4 as the 22 March 2010.
[18] This launch date was subsequently delayed to 12 April 2010.
[19]
On 10 February 2010, a
release candidate was published:
Version:RC.
[20]
On 12 April 2010, the
final version of .NET Framework 4.0 was launched alongside the final release of Visual Studio 2010.
On 18 April 2011, version 4.0.1 was released supporting some customer-demanded fixes for
Windows Workflow Foundation.
[21] Its design-time component, which requires Visual Studio 2010 SP1, adds a workflow state machine designer.
[22]
On 19 October 2011, version 4.0.2 was released supporting some new features of
Microsoft SQL Server.
[23]
Windows Server AppFabric
After the release of the .NET Framework 4, Microsoft released a set of enhancements, named
Windows Server AppFabric,
[24] for
application server capabilities in the form of AppFabric Hosting
[25][26] and in-memory distributed caching support.
.NET Framework 4.5
.NET Framework 4.5 was released on 15 August 2012.,
[27] a set of new or improved features were added into this version.
[28] The .NET Framework 4.5 is only supported on
Windows Vista or later.
[29][30]
.NET for Metro style apps
Metro
style apps are designed for specific form factors and leverage the
power of the Windows operating system. A subset of the .NET Framework is
available for building Metro style apps for
Windows 8 using
C# or
Visual Basic. This subset is called
.NET APIs for Metro style apps.
The version of .NET Framework, runtime and libraries, used for Metro style apps is a part of the new
Windows Runtime,
which is the new platform and application model for Metro style apps.
It is an ecosystem that houses many platforms and languages, including
.NET,
C++ and
HTML5/
Javascript.
Framework Core
Core Features
- Ability to limit how long the regular expression engine will attempt to resolve a regular expression before it times out.
- Ability to define the culture for an application domain.
- Console support for Unicode (UTF-16) encoding.
- Support for versioning of cultural string ordering and comparison data.
- Better performance when retrieving resources.
- Zip compression improvements to reduce the size of a compressed file.
- Ability to customize a reflection context to override default reflection behavior through the CustomReflectionContext class.
Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
Asynchronous operations
In the .NET Framework 4.5, new asynchronous features were added to
the C# and Visual Basic languages. These features add a task-based model
for performing asynchronous operations.
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