Microsoft announced on Tuesday the release to manufacture of .NET Framework 3.0 and extensions to Visual Studio.NET for .NET 3.0, ahead of the expected release of Windows Vista later this year. At the TechEd Developers 2006 conference in Barcelona, Eric Rudder, Microsoft senior vice president of strategy, told delegates that the tools developers need to create applications for Windows Vista are now available in a stable form.
Version 3 of the framework is needed to write applications that use the new features in Vista, such as the Windows Presentation Foundation, previously code-named Avalon, and the Windows Communication Foundation, previously codenamed Indigo. Microsoft's CardSpace identity management framework is also included. While .NET 3.0 is available for Windows XP, many of the new features are specific to Windows Vista.
In addition to the framework itself, Microsoft is releasing some add-ons for Visual Studio 2005 optimised for the new version of .NET. These add-ons still don’t provide full development capabilities with .NET 3.0, and developers will have to wait until the next release of Visual Studio, code-named Orcas, to get these. Orcas isn't due for release until after Windows Vista, and at present Microsoft isn't giving any predictions of a shipping date.
Developers targeting Windows Vista can now allow designers to work on user interface layout directly using Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer. This graphical tool can be used in conjunction with Visual Studio, and relieves you of the task of translating an image-based UI design into code, but still gives you control over the logic behind the interface, Microsoft said.
Also announced at the conference was Beta 2 of the ASP.NET AJAX framework, previously known as Atlas, and an update to the development tools for Microsoft Office to support Office 2007. Atlas provides a set of back-end classes for ASP.NET and client-side code to interact with it. Microsoft claims that this latest beta "peacefully co-exists" with other frameworks that developers or end-users may be using.
Both the framework and the add-in tools are available for download from MSDN immediately.
