Over the last ten years of building the .NET runtime, quite a number of assumptions have changed. Early on we could assume that most computer users only had one processor. Today, the assumption is that you have at least two processors. While including parallelism in an app for performance challenges most developers, what if that parallelism came fo...

The .NET Framework just passed 3 million downloads. During this time, we’ve been monitoring your experience, paying attention to both telemetry and social traffic. One of the first things I do every morning is read through all the Twitter traffic about .NET. Many others on the .NET team do the same. If you’ve raised an issue about .NET compatibi...

The only experience most Microsoft customers have with the .NET Framework is the deployment and installation experience, which is why we spend so much time analyzing opportunities to improve it. For .NET 4.5, our goal was to build a product that was equivalent to a service pack with additional features. Our team studied how other products with s...

Late last year, Vance Morrison, who is currently an architect on the .NET Framework Performance team, released PerfView, which is a new performance tool for .NET developers. PerfView helps you discover and investigate performance hotspots in .NET Framework apps, and enables you to deliver consistently high-performance apps to your customers. Usin...

Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of Visual Studio 2012 and the .NET Framework 4.5. You can read more about the Visual Studio 2012 launch on Jason Zander’s blog. We’ve been using the new version of Visual Studio for several months now to build .NET Framework apps for Windows, Windows Store, Windows Azure, and Window Server. The Visual St...

As many developers have noticed, the reflection APIs changed in the .NET API set for Windows Store apps. Much of .NET’s ability to offer a consistent programming model to so many platforms over the last ten years has been the result of great architectural thinking. The changes to reflection are here to prepare for the challenges over the next de...

Updated (2017): See .NET Framework Releases to learn about newer releases. This release is unsupported. Updated – 8/16/2012: Added license information about the source code release. Today, we are happy to announce the availability of Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012. You can develop apps that will take advantage of all the grea...

The .NET Framework team is out at conferences all the time. We love getting to meet with you all to discuss the latest news about what we’re building and even better learning about what all of you want to build. Deon Herbert, a program manager on the .NET Framework project management team, pulled together the following article for all of you ...

What makes managed code, “managed”? Most people would point to the garbage collector. Automatic memory management makes a tremendous difference in programmer productivity. And when garbage collection improves, all .NET applications benefit. Abhishek Mondal, the program manager for GC on the Common Language Runtime, and Maoni Stephens, the develo...

As programming with .NET has become prevalent on all Microsoft platforms, targeting multiple platforms at once becomes a critical desire amongst developers. In fact, we see the future of library development moving to supporting an intersection of platforms rather than targeting just one version of the .NET Framework at a time. Mircea Trofin, a pro...