Things in .NET Framework 4 that every programmer should know [closed]

Answer 1

I would also refer to original documentation (MSDN in this case) for a comprehensive list of improvements and additions:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171868.aspx

From that article you can easily find the things that can improve the existing code base.

Answer 2

The ASP.net cache is now in its own assembly!

System.runtime.caching.dll

which means you can use in other apps like WPF and WinForms without having to pull in the whole system.web assembly

I just wish they would have beefed up the CacheItem to include built-in information about the cache item like when it was added...when it will expire, etc

Answer 3

For ASP.NET programmers the ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 Web Development Overview white paper gives a comprehensive overview of what is new in ASP.NET 4. For a series of articles on the most prominent and interesting changes I'd recommend Scott Gutherie's series of blog posts on VS 2010 and .NET 4 Series.

Answer 4

The DirectoryInfo class in addition to the GetDirectories and GetFiles methods now has their lazy versions EnumerateDirectories and EnumerateFiles, which avoid us to have large arrays to hold all the objects at once.

Answer 5

I believe there are also enhancements to WCF that eliminate previous annoyances like not being able to configure WebGet/WebInvoke differently for each endpoint in .Net 3.5. I believe it is fully configurable in 4.0.

Answer 6

• Parallel for loops

  Parallel.For(0,10,(i)=>
  {
      // Do stuff in parallel.
  });
  

The rest of the Parallel class provides some other great things like Parallel.Invoke(...) and Parallel.ForEach(...).

Also, if you do anything with Linq, you can use the ParallelEnumerable.AsParallel() Method to convert your Linq queries to run in parallel.

It's all built on the Task Parallel Library which provides a great set of API's for working with tasks in an abstracted way that scales for whatever resources your machine has without having to think too much about exactly how many threads you are creating.