Improvements to .NET 3.5

Just when we were catching up with the latest .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft is making plans to extend the client side capabilities (Microsoft seems to be on a roll here with the .NET framework). On the surface it may appears as minor improvements on the client side however the following features that MS plans to release would help position their Software+Service strategy.

- The new enhancements will provide a faster setup process as the installation process can determine the minimum .NET requirements and install only those, it can even do a delta framework install – if you already have .NET 2.0 installed it will install only the required 3.x bits etc. From an end user experience it would be big – think ClickOnce. In the future release of .NET (think 4.0+) its expected that Microsoft will introduce “.NET Profiles” where you can install a minimal version of the framework by selecting only the required assemblies this capability is being thought of largely due to the evolution of the SilverLight runtime and its support for cross platform capabilities.
- Improvements in application startup time: if it’s the first time your running the .NET application the runtime will have to load several resources into memory and would result in a long disk I/O. Microsoft plans to improve this “Cold Startup” scenario significantly in the upcoming release
- As more and more form factors implementing WPF as the front end for presentation and better user experience they would face challenges with WPF rendering and runtime performance, Microsoft is aware of this and has plans to release capabilities that would improve the performance of WPF around graphics rendering,text rendering, media, render transformations etc. Microsoft is also expected to release a new set of WPF controls like date picker, data grid etc.