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 great features that we have added, including new features in Windows 8. We are also announcing the availability of the .NET Framework 4.5 reference source code, under the Microsoft Reference Source License (MS-RSL).
You can read more about the Visual Studio 2012 release on Jason Zander's blog and Soma's blog. Please visit the Visual Studio 2012 downloads page to install both products.
Improvements in the .NET Framework 4.5
We have made many improvements in the .NET Framework 4.5. Many of these advances help you write better apps with less effort, while others help you target particular Microsoft platforms. In either case, you'll find the new features useful and relevant for the apps that you write today.
- Core runtime and class library improvements
The most important core advance is the new async programming model, which has broad support across the common language runtime (CLR), the .NET Framework base class libraries, and the C#, Visual Basic, and F# languages. In particular, we added hundreds of new Task-returning methods across the .NET Framework libraries.We made performance improvements in many parts of the core. Given the focus on async, we made the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and other concurrency APIs faster. We also made across-the-board improvements in the CLR, including multicore JIT, MPGO, and big wins in CLR garbage collection. If you are building responsive or scalable systems, or would like to take advantage of multicore and manycore processors, you'll find this a very exciting release.Visual Studio 2012 has built-in support for creating portable class libraries, which make it easier to re-use your code across apps built for different platforms.
- Windows Store app programming experience for C# and Visual Basic