.NET innovation at //BUILD 2014

Cesar De la Torre

Today, April 3rd 2014 we showed a lot of new innovation and investment, for the future, on every single area of .NET, starting from the core of .NET, the basis for business applications on top of the web or the Windows desktop, going to scalable cloud services in Microsoft Azure, and reaching the end users in Windows Store devices and even through cross-device development strategies.

Here’s the global picture that I created for //BUILD. Let’s drill down to get a brief summary of the different areas while providing the most important links to the details, so you can research where you are more interested.

Core:

Runtime

Starting from the core, we’re announcing the next generation of the .NET JIT compiler (preview) (codename RyuJIT) which offers great benefits on application startup and performance and a preview of SIMD, which provides unprecedented performance on graphics’ parallelized processing. Read more info about both topics here.

C# and VB Compilers: The .NET Compiler Platform

Additionally, we are releasing a preview update of our future C# and VB compilers (codename “Roslyn” and officially named as .NET Compiler Platform, that you can try out right now in Visual Studio 2013, after installing the UPDATE 2 RC. Its final version will be part of the next version of .NET and Visual Studio. The .NET Compiler Platform is not just about compilers but it is an open platform that provides an API so anyone can extend the developer experience enriching the IDE with refactoring, code analysis and custom diagnostics.

Here I’m also publishing a whole blog post where I’m providing a brief overview of the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”).

Services and Web:

Related to Services, Microsoft is releasing .NET support and tooling to build Azure Mobile Services as well as releasing ASP.NET updates included in Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC.

Windows devices and .NET Native:

There’s great innovation focusing on the convergence of the Windows Store and Windows Phone apps development through the new Universal projects. Additionally to that and for Windows Store or Windows Phone apps developed with .NET, Microsoft is releasing a preview of .NET Native (native code compilation), offering native compilation optimized with the C++ optimizer, while getting the benefits and productivity of C#.

Cross device platforms:

We live nowadays in a world of multiple devices and heterogeneous platforms. In a fractured development landscape, .NET developers are more relevant than ever before. If you want to maximize productivity and ROI when targeting multiple device platforms, you need to have a clear and effective cross-device strategy. Microsoft is strongly partnering with Xamarin so you can get the best value proposition when developing native apps across multiple platforms.

Openness:

We also announced at //BUILD 2014 how the .NET innovation is heading to open source initiatives thru the .NET Foundation organization, in order to foster open development, collaboration and community engagement on the .NET platform. I really think it is great to have a single umbrella where we get together the most important OSS projects built with .NET (from any organization, not just Microsoft). This is just the beginning, the list will grow a lot in the future.

I especially like having Miguel de Icaza (Xamarin) leading this initiative.

Here I provide a table with a bunch of resources covering all the topics I just mentioned:

Resources

There’s a lot of great stuff being announced at //BUILD, huge .NET innovation, but stay tuned, we’ll be disclosing even more new .NET innovation in the near future while heading to the next version of .NET and Visual Studio.

Good times for .NET!   🙂

Cesar De la Torre Principal Program Manager, Azure

Follow