Today, we are announcing the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview, which includes new features and improvements across the product. We've made it easier to build .NET apps in Visual Studio, with convenient and useful productivity improvements that are a direct response to your feedback and requests. .NET apps are now faster, because they make better use of your hardware. We've also laid groundwork that will enable you to more easily take advantage of updates to the .NET Framework.
Before we get into the details, we'd like to share some of the successes we've seen with the .NET Framework 4.5, which was released less than a year ago. Today, there are ~90M machines in active use globally that have the .NET Framework 4.5 installed, out of ~1B active total machines with the .NET Framework. We've seen Windows Azure and other cloud services add support for the .NET Framework 4.5. We've also heard from many ISVs who have moved their apps to the .NET Framework 4.5 and many more who explicitly support it. And we've seen enthusiastic acceptance of the asynchronous programming model (which was completed in the .NET Framework 4.5), both by you and more broadly across the technology industry. These all provide a great starting point for the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview, the first update to the .NET Framework 4.5.
This post is an overview of the .NET Framework 4.5.1. We will be posting more detailed information on the release in the coming weeks.
What's in the box?
In the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview, you'll find that we've delivered a valuable set of large and small improvements that build on top of the .NET Framework 4 and 4.5 releases. We had a much shorter ship schedule for the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview, so it was important to prioritize the set of scenarios and features that we aimed to tackle. Many of you have short ship schedules, too, so you'll probably sympathize. We focused our effort on the following key areas:
- Developer productivity
- Application performance
- Continuous innovation
Within those three areas, we spent much of our effort on requests from uservoice and other feedback channels, as you'll see in the sections below. You'll really like those.
Read more: .NET Framework blog
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