32 msdn magazine
The Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.1 release, along
with Visual Studio 2013, introduces innovative features to increase
developer productivity and application performance. Additionally,
it provides new features for improving the UX of consuming .NET
NuGet packages, which is important because NuGet is a primary
delivery vehicle for .NET Framework libraries.
The previous product, the .NET Framework 4.5, was a big
release with many new features. It has been installed on more than
200 million machines. Th e .NET Framework 4.5.1 was released
about 14 months later in October 2013, and despite the short
time frame, it comes packed with many features requested by
customers. In this article, I’ll review the new features in the .NET
Framework 4.5.1, and for more details, you can refer to .NET
Framework 4.5.1 RTM (bit.ly/1bBlEPN) and .NET Framework 4.5.1
Preview (bit.ly/10Vr2ft) posts on the .NET Framework Blog.
Th e .NET Framework 4.5.1 is only a part of what the .NET team
(of which I’m a member) has been working on over the past year.
We also shipped several libraries on NuGet to fi ll platform gaps
and to enable new scenarios. I’ll provide an overview of our .NET
NuGet libraries and also highlight one of our deep investments,
the new .NET just-in-time (JIT) compiler, which shipped as a
Community Technology Preview (CTP) release around the same
time as the .NET Framework 4.5.1.
More Productive Development
I’ll start with new debugging features delivered with the .NET
Framework 4.5.1 to improve developer productivity.
Async Debugging Improvements Aft er setting up a solid and
easy-to-use base for the asynchronous programming model in
the previous Framework releases, we wanted to smooth out some
remaining aspects for the overall developer experience with the
.NET Framework 4.5.1. Two questions are essential for debugging
asynchronous code: “How did I get into this async method?” and
“What is the state of all the tasks in my application?” Visual Studio
2013 introduces enhancements to the Call Stack and Tasks windows
to help you fi nd answers to these questions in a much more intui-
tive way. Th ese improvements are supported for desktop, Web and
Windows Store apps on Windows 8.1 and are available for C++
and JavaScript as well.
It’s common to have nested async method calls within an
app or library, which rely on the await keyword to manage the fl ow of
execution. Previously, Visual Studio didn’t show the chain of
async calls when stopped at a breakpoint within a Task. Visual
Studio 2013 provides a logical and sequential view of methods in
a nested chain of calls for both asynchronous and synchronous
methods. Th is makes it easier to understand how the program
reached a location inside an asynchronous call.
Figure 1 shows an asynchronous code sample. Figure 2 and Figure
3 demonstrate the diff erence between the call stack views of Visual
Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013 for that code. More details of this
.NET FRAMEWORK
Explore the Microsoft
.NET Framework 4.5.1
Gaye Oncul Kok
This article discusses:
- New debugging features
- Application performance enhancements
- Easier use of NuGet libraries
- The new RyuJIT compiler
Technologies discussed:
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.1, Visual Studio 2013