Windows 7 may have gotten much of the attention at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday, but on Wednesday other Microsoft programs got their turn to shine.
In keynote speeches by Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group; Scott Guthrie, vice president of Microsoft’s .NET Developer Division; and others, attendees were shown demos of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0.
The two application are being developed with a focus on concurrent execution, to take advantage of the trend toward parallel processing in laptops and desktops. They also have slick new interface options intended to support the look and feel of Windows 7.
“You’re going to see a lot of investment in multi-core development,” Guthrie said, “specifically around allowing you to build parallel applications that take advantage of multiple processes and multiple cores, as well as in debugging analysis tools that you can actually see what code is happening on which core, and when it happens, and how you coordinate that.”
The demos were somewhat surprising, given the fact that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP1 just came out earlier this year. But Microsoft has been working on creating richer visual displays through the use of a software library called Windows Presentation Foundation. Visual Studio 2010 has been engineered specifically to use WPF to produce flashier interfaces without the performance penalties that initially plagued Vista’s Aero.
Guthrie told attendees that .NET 4.0 will make extensive use of WPF, but the real benefit lies in the improved start-up times that have already been built into the most recent .NET Framework upgrade.
“In particular for client development, we spent a lot of time focusing on performance,” Guthrie said. “In general, we see about a 40 percent cold start-up performance win for .NET applications that have…