Microsoft PDC attendees get 'the goods'
Microsoft provided attendees of its Professional Developer Conference this week with a 160 GB drive full of bits and resources. The Windows 7 M3 pre-beta build and Windows Server 2008 R2 M3 pre-beta are on the drives.
(The Windows 7 build attendees got is the September build 6801 that leaked out a month ago. The new taskbar and quite a bit of the other eye candy Microsoft showed off during the October 28 PDC keynote aren't part of the pre-beta build.)
What else is on those PDC drives? The UXEvangelist blog provides the full list of the PDC goods. A few of the goodies:
- Live Framework Software Development Kit
- Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0 test builds
- Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 Express Edition
- Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio and the Windows Azure SDK
Speaking of .Net 4.0, the next version of Microsoft's .Net Framework, there are a number of new features and enhancements that Microsoft is showing off in the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of .Net 4.0. Among them:
- Silverlight features: Deep Zoom support, Visual State Manager, new text rendering enhancements and more Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) support
- The ability to load Common Language Runtime 2 and 4 in the same address space
- Managed and native code interoperability improvements
- Dynamic Language Runtime libraries built into the core library framework
- Support for the Microsoft Managed Extensions Framework