Chris Alexander

On Engineering

New in .NET 4

6th April, 2010

I was recently at an all-day event with Scott Guthrie from Microsoft - read about the event here. Here I collect what he had to say about what’s new in .NET 4.

Once again this is a collection of random thoughts, mostly as Scott came up with them, and the ones I decided to note down for myself. Hopefully there are a few useful morsels in here for anyone interested.

CLR

.NET 4 comes with a new version of the CLR (Common Language Runtime). .NET 3 and 3.5 still used the CLR v2, but v4 has been rolled out with the new version.

This allows you to develop, install and run .NET 4 and .NET 3.5 and lower applications side-by-side on the same machine, and this is the reason you can run Visual Studio 2010 and 2008 on the same machine - and also why their solutions are incompatible with each other.

More

… and I just realised that’s pretty much all I wrote down. Scott did cover a lot more, so head over to his blog to find out some more details on the new framework.