Concomitantly with the availability of Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft also rolled out .NET Framework 4.0 Beta. The pair of the Redmond company's productivity platform and tools have been offered to MSDN and TechNet subscribers on May 18, 2009, with public downloads scheduled to go live today, May 20. At the same time, the software giant is offering complementary resources for the latest releases of Visual Studio and .NET Framework. Case in point: samples and the training kit for the Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation for .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1.

First off, developers can access a package of samples for both WCF and WF for .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1. Weighing in at just 1.6MB, WCF and WF Samples for .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 has gone live on May 19, 2009. Starting later today, with the public availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, even developers that don't have an MSDN account can leverage these resources.

In addition, the WCF / WF 4 Training Kit is now live on MSDN. Microsoft is essentially offering no less than a collection of 6 hands-on labs focused on WCF and WF 4. According to the Redmond company the WCF / WF 4 Training Kit brings to the table the following items: Introduction to Workflow, Workflow Services, Flowchart, Workflow Designer, Service Discovery and Monitoring.

With the help of the kit developers will be able to “Learn basic workflow creation, hosting and running, and test-drive workflow development. Get an introduction to workflow services, communication between workflows and content based correlation of workflow instances. Use the flexibility of Flowchart workflow activities to implement non-sequential workflows. Learn how to rehost the workflow designer in a WPF desktop application and customize it in several ways. Learn how you can leverage some of the main WF and WCF monitoring features to track application execution and troubleshoot problems with services when necessary. Learn how Service discovery allows you to locate services on the same subnet using ad hoc discovery, or using a proxy to establish connections with servers regardless of where they are,” Microsoft explained.