Preparing for Windows 10 event
On Wednesday I attended this meetup. It was fairly informative. There is a bit uncertainty about the new features of Windows 10, Visual Studio 2015 and C# 6.0 but it was still good to cover most of them in a few hours.
It was divided into two main sections: Windows 10 and VS 2015/C# 6.0. I’m planning to review these myself and blog about them separately but here are the highlights of the events:
Windows 10
When they first announced the name I immediately thought about Winamp skipping version 4. We all know how that story ended so I hope Windows 10 fares better than that!
A few items discussed in the event about Windows 10:
- First demonstration was sending a feedback which was painfully slow and it took forever to send a simple feedback message.
- Some enterprise features are coming like like having store and custom company portals
- There was a rather long discussion about what the 4 device from the left was in the image below:
I don’t think it makes any difference though but the idea is having one code base and one store to deploy apps to various devices with different form factors. Sounds cool but I’m a bit cautious about it for the time being. If it sounds to good to be true, it generally isn’t!
- Looks like they are going to use hamburger icons everywhere which they initially opposed to.
- There seems to be back buttons in a few screens which is a bit unusual so they may have to deal with some lash back from people like they did for their brilliant(!) charms invention.
Visual Studio 2015
- There will be a free version of VS 2015 and there is already a free version for VS 2013 called “Community Edition”. It’s said to be Professional equivalent so it sounds cool to have it for free.
- Like all Microsoft products versioning is a bit off and confusing here as well. There was a discussion about the version number vs. release year. So VS 2013 actually is version 12 but VS 2015 is version 14 even though there is no other VS in the middle!
- A research project called Pex used to generate unit tests made its way to VS 2015 under Smart Unit Tests. It should help to create a lot boilerplate test code.
C# 6.0
- Not a C# feature but one of the most impressive developments nowadays is that .NET Framework has become open source.
- New version is coming with a much faster 64-bit compiler called .net RyuJIT
- .net Native Project N is coming which is supposedly make the applications run faster
- The compiler has been completely rewritten and its name is now Roslyn. It’s open sources and it exposes APIs that can be consumed by any application. So the compiler doesn’t have be a black box anymore.
Conclusion
A lot of exciting and revolutionary developments are going on in the .NET world these days. Taking a more open-source and multi-platform based approach will definitely help the platform in the future. It’s thrilling to be a developer and experience them first hand as these news come along. I have my virtual machine running Windows 10 and VS 2015 so I’ll play around more and blog about these specific features in detail in the near future.
