With much less fanfare than the previous version Microsoft released the latest version of the .NET framework earlier this month at the TechEd Europe developers conference in Barcelona. The reason for the low-key launch? This release is a renamed, repackaged version of .NET Framework 2.0 with the new Windows Presentation Foundations (WPF, formerly XAML), Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) and a few other features of the Windows Vista feature set we’ve been waiting on for some time.
This new feature set has been known to the community under many names, and when rumours of .NET 3.0 started to circulate they seemed to have come out of nowhere. Once it was explained that this version is really an extension of .NET Fx 2.0 many of the tensions began to subside.
Any application which compiles and runs against .NET 2.0 will run with .NET 3.0, so feel free to add in these new features, but don’t fret. This won’t be as significant an upgrade as the 1.1-2.0 transition.
For more detailed info, check out the .NET Framework site, and the .NET 3.0 Framework community site.
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