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Exit WinFX, enter .NET 3

Posted on 25 Aug 2006 at 15:36

Thomas Lee explains the thinking behind Winfx's new name, and dissects its constituent parts

Given this potential for confusion, Somasegar explains that Microsoft has finally decided to rebrand WinFX as .NET 3, which in his view best identifies what it really is; namely, the next version of the developer framework. He also confirms that .NET 3 is to ship with Vista and Longhorn, and will be back-ported to Windows XP SP 2 and Server 2003. The latest Vista build released to beta testers reports .NET 3 as being installed. To some degree, this decision to back-port .NET 3 to Windows XP slightly diminishes the attractiveness of Vista. It was clearly not an easy decision, as Microsoft has to balance its corporate user base, which is unlikely to switch en masse to Vista the day it launches, against its huge consumer base, which will simply get Vista when they buy a new computer.

The decision to back-port is, however, great news for XP customers, in that all the .NET 3 goodies can be used on their existing Windows XP corporate builds and will become richer still when Vista eventually ships. Moulster explains that: ".NET Framework 3 on Windows XP is not a scaled-down version - if you run .NET Framework 3 on XP, you'll get all the features. We believe Windows Vista is a better environment for your applications, however: it's more secure, more stable, has a much better user interface, better search and organisational facilities, makes better use of the graphics processor, and so on. In short, Windows Vista is our strategic client platform moving forward."

The journey to .NET 3 has been yet another exercise in marketing speak versus reality for Microsoft, as well as a case study in chasing an ever-moving target. That said, let's not be too unkind, because .NET 3 offers some great features and is a real step forward in the evolution of .NET. So let's see what exactly is in the new release and what it might mean to you as a developer.

New features

Microsoft describes .NET 3 as combining the power of .NET Framework 2 with new technologies for building applications, and you can think of it as a set of four new technologies that are built onto and extend the .NET 2 CLR and class libraries. The overall structure of .NET 3 is depicted in the diagram above. The four new technologies inside .NET 3 are:

• Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), previously called Indigo, enables developers to create secure, reliable, transactional and interoperable distributed applications.

• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), previously known as Avalon, provides developers and designers with the ability to create graphically richer Windows client applications.

• Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) provides the ability to create workflow-enabled applications without the need to use BizTalk.

• Windows CardSpace (WCS), previously called InfoCard, enables users to manage their digital identities simply and easily, but with more control and greater security.

WCF brings together a number of Microsoft's earlier communications technologies - ASP.NET Web Services, .NET Remoting, .NET Enterprise Services, Web Services Enhancements, and Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) - and it's a key component in Microsoft's interoperability story. All the features necessary for SOA (service oriented architecture) applications are built into WCS, along with good support for the latest WS-* standards, which all makes for a powerful interop story. At the technical level, WCF services expose a collection of endpoints, in effect creating portals for communicating with the outside world. Each endpoint has an Address, a Binding and a Contract (referred to as ABC) - the Address is where the endpoint lives, the Binding is how it communicates and the Contract specifies what it communicates.