.NET 3.5 Summer Refresh Announced
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By David Worthington
March 4, 2008 —
With .NET Framework 3.5 out the door, Microsoft is working to dispel the shortcomings that some developers have found.
An update slated for this summer will improve its installer, cold start-up times and the performance of WPF applications, the company said. Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in the Developer Division, laid out the specifics in a February blog posting.
One lingering issue has been the framework’s installer. Guthrie acknowledged that developers have been asking Microsoft for years to streamline the .NET Framework’s installation and setup. Now, the company will respond by making it easier for developers to build optimized setup packages. Another attempt at streamlining comes in reducing the payload of .NET Framework 3.5 packages, to a minimal set.
For instance, if a user already has .NET Framework 2.0 installed on his machine, the setup will download and upgrade the bits necessary to update to .NET 3.5, and will not re-download any components already present, Guthrie explained.
Billy Hollis, an author and Microsoft “regional director”—one of a number of volunteers recognized by Microsoft’s Developer Platform evangelism group for technical expertise—said that streamlining the client install of the .NET Framework is helpful, because it currently “takes too long for a casual installation.”
Hollis added that .NET Framework 3.5 was quite large, at well over 100MB, because it includes all versions starting with 2.0. By comparison, the Java SE 6 runtime environment for Windows is slightly over 15 MB.
Chris Menegay, a principal consultant for Notion Solutions and another Microsoft regional director, noted that the .NET Framework is often orders of magnitude larger than the actual application being installed. And, if what Guthrie is saying holds true, install time will drop dramatically.
The new setup framework will work with other installation frameworks, such as Macrovision’s InstallShield, and will be more tightly coupled with Microsoft’s ClickOnce and Windows Installer tools.
Snapping to It
After applications are installed, .NET’s Common Language Runtime (CLR) dictates how well they will perform. Microsoft intends to optimize CLR data structures to reduce disk I/O operations and improve memory layout when loading and running applications.
Guthrie predicted that with those changes, .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 applications would realize a cold-start performance improvement of 25 to 40 percent, contingent on application size. Applications will not require recoding or recompilation in Visual Studio to take advantage of the potential performance improvements.
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) will also get a face-lift. A service update to WPF will optimize the performance of its text, graphics, media and data stack.
Specific areas of improvement include:
• Container recycling and data virtualization support will be reworked to enhance data scalability.
• DropShadow and Blur bitmap effects are being moved from software to hardware rendering.
• Faster text performance has been sought in Visual and DrawingBrush scenarios.
• Various media and video performance tweaks are in the works.
The APIs for the aforementioned affects will remain unchanged—again, no code changes will be necessary, Guthrie said. A new WriteableBitmap API is being added to enable real-time bitmap updates from a software surface.
Microsoft will release a number of new controls for WPF later this year, at an unspecified date. Those include Calendar/DatePicker, DataGrid and Ribbon controls.
“The improvements to the WPF control set are pretty significant,” Hollis said. “I personally don’t use data grids much in user interface design, but I know of others who have avoided WPF, primarily because it lacks a built-in data grid. It’s also hard to build a complex business application on WPF without date controls, as I found out when I began building them last year.”
A service update to Visual Studio 2008 is expected to enhance its WPF designer. This will include event tab support within the property grid for control events, toolbox support within source mode, and other miscellaneous features customers have requested, according to Guthrie. Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Framework became generally available last November.
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