Fresh from the delivery of its Visual Studio 2008 toolset and .Net Framework 3.5 this past fall, Microsoft is readying enhancements to these technologies in the area of client development, a Microsoft official said in a blog this week. “We have put a lot of effort into addressing some of the biggest areas of customer feedback, while also trying to really push the envelope on the capabilities developers have when building Windows applications,” said Scott Guthrie, general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog. “All of these improvements build on top of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, and will make .NET client development even better going forward.”Enhancements planned for the next few months include: • Improved .Net Framework setup for client applications. Due this summer, the improvements will make it easier to build optimized setup packages and can be integrated with existing installation frameworks such as InstallShield. Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation applications will be able to use the setup framework via a bootstrap utility. • Improved working set and startup improvements for .Net client applications. This is intended to enable .Net client applications to launch faster in “cold startup” situations, in which no other .Net client applications are running and the OS must load lots of pages from disk. Also due this summer, the improvement will be made available via an update to the Common Language Runtime that features significant internal optimizations to data structures. An improvement of 25 percent to 40 percent is anticipated for cold startup performance. • Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) improvements. A service update to WPF this summer will include performance optimizations for text, graphics, media and the data stack. A new WriteableBitmap API will enable real-time bitmap updates from a software surface. Support for a new effects API also is planned for building richer graphics scenarios. • WPF control improvements. Due later this year, new controls being worked on include DataGrid, Ribbon and Calendar/DatePicker controls• Visual Studio 2008 WPF Designer improvements. A servicing update to Visual Studio 2008 is planned including feature additions to the WPF Designer. Included are tab support within a property grid for control events, toolbox support within source code and other enhancements. “The above improvements should make it easier to build great desktop applications,” Guthrie said. Software Development