14 DAY TRIAL // Developers building applications leveraging the next generation of .NET Framework, have available a range of resources on MSDN to help them out, including a list designed to enumerate the breaking changes introduced with version 4.5.
Microsoft released .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview along with the Windows 8 Developer Preview and the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview in September 2011 at BUILD.
Devs should head over to the “Application Compatibility in the .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview” page on MSDN in order to understand potential incompatibility problems.
“This topic describes application compatibility issues between the .NET Framework 4 and the .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview, including fixes and changes based on customer feedback,” the software giant reveals.
“Most of these changes do not require any programming modifications in your applications. For those that may involve modifications, see the Impact column of the tables.”
In addition, the Redmond company also provides a list designed to highlight what has become obsolete in the .NET Framework.
According to Microsoft, a lot of work went into ensuring that .NET Framework 4.5 is fully backward compatible with applications built for .NET Framework 4.
The reason for this is rather simple. The software giant reveals that .NET Framework 4.5 is intended as an in-place upgrade to .NET Framework 4, the latter being completely replaced. .NET Framework 4.5 will however install side-by-side with .NET Framework 3.5, for example.
But because it upgrades .NET Framework 4, .NET Framework 4.5 needs to ensure that any existing programs will continue to work. One measure that Microsoft set in place is related to the versioning strategy for .NET Framework 4.5.
Early adopters already testing .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview will notice that the latest release shares the same version number as its predecessor, namely 4.0.30319.
While Microsoft works to ensure backward compatibility, devs also need to make sure that their existing applications will not break when users deploy .NET 4.5.
.NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview is available for download here.
Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is available for download here. Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) is available for download here.