14 DAY TRIAL // There has been prolonged silence on the Microsoft Axum front for quite a while now, a situation that prompted questions and speculations that the project might have been discontinued. Nothing could be further from the truth, and a new release of the .NET parallel programming language comes to prove that Axum is very much alive. As of April 23rd, Microsoft is offering version 0.3 of Axum via the Download Center. The latest release of the project comes with support for Visual Studio 2010, which Microsoft released to manufacturing recently, along with .NET Framework 4. Developers will be able to find the download links for Axum, .NET Framework 4, as well as the trial versions of Visual Studio 2010 RTM at the bottom of this article.
“Axum was, and still is, an incubation effort. What incubation means at Microsoft is something between research and product development: the aim is not to advance the state of the art, as we do with basic research, nor is it to ship a product in a timely manner. Rather, the purpose of doing an incubation is to assess the feasibility and viability of a technology when market research methodologies aren’t likely to be sufficient: there is no commitment to productize, but there is more to it than just throwing ideas over the wall. Thus, we developed Axum and got the technology out there in the DevLabs release last year, updated it once, and you haven’t seen anything since,” Niklas Gustafsson, architect Parallel Computing Platform Microsoft, explained in March 2010.
Gustafsson revealed that Microsoft was considering whether to release a VS2010-tailored version of Axum earlier this year or not. It appears that, with the latest update to the language, the company considered that making Axum compatible with Visual Studio 2010 made sense. However, there are only two people currently working on the evolution of Axum, in the context in which the initial team numbered a total of three Microsoft employees.
“Shipping a new programming language means committing to many years of maintaining it, so it’s something we would want to make sure we’re doing the right way. The question of what to do with it is on our minds: do we ship it in Visual Studio, should it be a separate release, should we just steal from it and integrate ideas into other languages? Should we find a narrower field that it addresses particularly well (discrete-event simulation, for example) and tailor it for that domain, or is this a more broadly applicable model?” Gustafsson asked.
Microsoft Axum is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.