The sneak peek that Microsoft allowed into the development process of Windows 7 was sufficient in order to deliver a taste of the evolution of parallel computing on the next iteration of the Windows platform. But it is not just Windows 7 that is evolving to embrace multilcore and manycore architectures. Microsoft's next generation development platform, Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework version 4.0 environment, will also advance in terms of their parallel computing capabilities.

“Parallel Extensions will indeed be a part of the .NET Framework 4.0,” revealed Stephen Toub, Senior Program Manager Lead on the Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft. “Not only will it be a part of it, it will be a core part of it. [S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division] cites the following as key focuses for the release: significantly improve the core pillars of the developer experience; support for the latest platforms spanning the client, web, server, services and devices and targeted and simplified developer experiences for different application types.”

Announced at the end of September 2008, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, the successors of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5, are right on track not only to span across clients, servers and the Cloud, but also to enable the development of parallel applications. Along with the under-the-hood changes in Windows 7, VS2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 will support building highly concurrent and asynchronous programs.

“So in the .NET Framework 4.0, you’ll find the Task Parallel Library at the heart of the Framework in mscorlib.dll. You’ll find PLINQ sitting in System.Core.dll right alongside LINQ-to-Objects. And you’ll find new coordination and synchronization data types spread across various DLLs, enabling not only your applications, but the .NET Framework itself. We’ll be diving into more details at the PDC, and we hope you’ll join us for that,” Toub added.