Visual Studio 2008 support for new .NET 4

Question

Will Visual Studio 2008 be supported by new .NET 4 from the get go?

I\'m particularly interested in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and the parallel task

Answer 1

Historically - No.

Starting with 2008 the IDE has been able to target lower version frameworks, but I doubt they will ever target a newer version framework.

Answer 2

While you can't use .NET 4.0 itself from VS2008, if you're interested in the Parallel Extensions stuff, you could download the Reactive Framework (formerly LINQ to Rx) which I believe contains at least a lot of Parallel Extensions backported to .NET 3.5 SP1.

From the Release Notes, it includes:

System.Threading, backport of Parallel Extensions for .NET 4 to .NET 3.5 SP1

• Task for executing asynchronous operations.
• Concurrent Collections such as ConcurrentStack, ConcurentQueue ad ConcurrentDictionary.
• PLINQ for writing parallel queries.
• addition Threading operations such as Barrier,SpinLock and SpinWait.

Answer 3

No. VS2008 will not be able to target .NET 4.0:

Visual Studio 2010 supports .NET 4 and earlier projects. Visual Studio 2008 supports .NET 3.5SP1 projects.

Hope this helps,
Polita Paulus
Developer Division
Microsoft

Reference

Answer 4

If you want to know whether upgrading to VS 2010 will be worth it, then download beta 2 now, and try it out. Run it in a virtual machine if you don't trust it on a normal development machine. Run through some of the PDC videos showing the new features. Go through the Training Courses.

And above all, tell Microsoft what you think.