.NET Framework 3.0 Released!

The .NET Framework version 3.0 was released this week. This iteration sees no change to the existing class library or the underlying CLR. Instead, it simply adds some significant new APIs on top of the existing 2.0 framework.

The new APIs are as follows: Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows CardSpace. Click here to download the redistributable.

Windows Vista as a Development Platform

As Windows Vista RC2 hit last week I've come across several mildly disturbing articles regarding the integrity of Vista as a development platform. First off was the announcement of SP1 Beta for Visual Studio 2005 on Somasegar's blog. Sounds like good news, right? Well, further down he also reveals that Vista will not support Visual Studio 2002 or Visual Studio 2003. In addition, he admits that Visual Studio 2005 will most likely suffer from compatibility issues beyond those addressed in SP1. In my mind this doesn't communicate strong support for what is supposed to be Microsoft's flagship development platform. I imagine this issue could easily stop most developers from trying Vista anytime soon due to the fact that they still need to continue supporting older applications via older versions of Visual Studio.

There have also been rumors going back and forth debating Java's ability to keep up with the new "Aero" look and feel in Vista. Thankfully, it appears as if this will only be an issue for older versions of Java.

On a positive note, IIS 7 in Vista will finally elevate PHP to a first class citizen. The newest version of Microsoft's webserver is on target to introduce a FastCGI host. Such a change will honor the single-process-per-request execution model of PHP, but do so much more efficiently than traditional CGI. For more information check out this blog entry by Mike Volodarsky (member of the IIS team).

The C# Coalesce Operator

This week I was excited to learn about the coalesce operator, a feature new to C# in .NET 2.0. Coded as a double question mark (??), it works by yielding the first non-null item from a group of two or more objects (as you might expect, this behavior is very much like the COALESCE function in MS SQL). Using this operator can help produce more elegant code if, for example, you've got something like this:

if (object1 != null)
{
  return object1;
}
else if (object2 != null)
{
  return object2;
}
else if (object3 != null)
{
  return object3;
}
else
{
  return null;
}

With the coalesce operator the above code block can be refactored into the following:

return object1 ?? object2 ?? object3;