.NET 3.5 SP1 Beta & VS2008 SP1 Beta

SP1 Beta for the .NET Framework 3.5 and the SP1 Beta for Visual Studio 2008 have been released. You can read about the new stuff on ScottGu’s Blog.

There are two thing on the new release of .NET that interest me above others the GPU-based effects and the new WriteableBitmap class that I plan to use in future Pixa’s features and I will cover them in future posts.

If you want to learn more on GPU-based Effects for WPF, keep an eye on Greg Schechter’s Blog.

WPF Enhancements

Scott Guthrie blogged about the .NET 3.5 client product roadmap. Check out the post for full detail, and here’s a short list of the things to expect:

1. DropShadow and Blur Bitmap effects will be hardware accelerated.
2. Improvements on Text.
3. Media and Video Performance.
4. New WriteableBitmap API will enable real time bitmap manipulation.
5. New Controls like DataGrid, Ribbon and Calendar/DatePicker.
6. Improvements on the VS 2008 WPF Designer.

And one more thing you do not need to recompile your applications to befit from the new features!!! As long as you have the latest updates installed.

Debugging .NET Framework Source Code

On October last year Scott Guthrie blogged about Microsoft plans to release the .NET Framework Source Code to enable debugging support with Visual Studio 2008, well the moment is come and now you can browse and debug the source code of the following libraries:

.NET Base Class Libraries:
System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections
System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics
System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO
System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime
System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc.

ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions)
Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)
Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows)
ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml)

And soon the LINQ, WCF and the Workflow Foundation will be added.

You can find a detailed post by Shawn Burke that explains the exact steps on how to enable this.