14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is cooking the evolution of .NET Framework 3.5. Scott Guthrie, vice president in the Microsoft Developer Division, has revealed that, in the coming months, the company will make available a number of improvements addressing client development that will come to accompany the web development features, introduced with the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. The tweaks are the result of feedback, and are set to deliver the next level in building Windows programs. According to Guthrie, the enhancements coming to Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 will help ensure the growth of .NET client development. Guthrie pointed that Microsoft aims to produce improvements to the .NET Framework Setup for Client Applications, as well as the Working Set and Startup for .NET Client Applications.
"This summer we are going to ship a new setup framework for .NET that makes it easier to build optimized setup packages for client applications. This setup framework can be integrated with existing installation frameworks (for example: products like InstallShield), and enables a smaller and faster end-user setup experience of the .NET Framework," Guthrie explained. "Windows Forms and WPF client applications will be able to use this setup framework to cleanly 'bootstrap' getting the .NET Framework installed onto machines. The setup 'bootstrap' utility will support automatically downloading the minimal set of .NET Framework packages needed to enable .NET 3.5 client applications on a machine."
Microsoft will also boost the speed at which .NET client applications launch in "cold startup" scenarios. The promise, at this point in time, is a performance gain of no less than 25% but up to 40%, according to Guthrie. Of course that the speed improvements are directly dependent on the size of the application. But the truly good news for developers is that they will not need to modify existent .NET 3.5 applications in order to take advantage of the improvements. There will be no code changes, no recompilation, no nothing. The benefits will be accessed automatically especially in situations when a .NET client application loads for the first time on a machine, also known as a "cold startup."
"This summer we are going to ship a servicing update to the CLR that makes some significant internal optimizations in how we optimize our data structures to cut down on disk IO and improve memory layout when loading and running applications. Among many other benefits, this work will significantly improve the working set and cold startup performance of .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 applications and will dramatically improve end-user experiences with .NET-based client applications," Guthrie added.