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These are notes I took at Joel Pobar’s “What’s New in .NET 2.0” breakout session.

New Features

• GZip compression is built-in. See the System.IO.Compression page for details.
• Strongly-typed resource files – no more returning everything as an object! See the Resource File Generator page for more details.
• Enhanced Console support – support for colors, cursor positioning, and sound (well, beep anyways). Download the Managed Space Invaders game.
• Built-in FTP support.  See the System.Net.WebRequest, System.Net.WebResponse, and System.Net.WebClient classes.

64-Bit

• The default MSIL-only compile option works on both 32 and 64 bit natively. If you are doing COM Interop or using PInvoke, then you need to make sure you run in the same “bitness” as the component does. You can change the options in either Visual Studio or via the command line.

Performance

• Long-term goal is to get performance of managed code equal to that of unmanaged code.
• Short-term goals for version 2 of the Framework were to reduce startup time and reduce the working set. Rico Mariani said that “space is speed”, so reduce the working set (the amount of memory that is used by a managed application) means it will run faster.
• To improve startup time, the CLR team spent a good bit of time improving NGen. To reduce the working set, the team increased the amount of shareable working set, or non-private memory, from 40 percent in 1.1 to 90 percent in 2.0.
• Interface/delegate invocation is 2x faster.
• Simple inter-app domain remoting is 200x faster.
• UTF8 Encoding is 2.5x faster.
• Lots of reflection performance improvements, including true lazy load on the GetMethod(string) method and lightweight codegen (generating only the essential code).

Generics

• It’s a CLR feature, so all .NET languages can support it if they want to. It’s available in both VB and C# right now.

Security

• Managed ACL support! New classes have been added to the .NET Framework that allow managed code to create and modify an ACL. New members that use an ACL have been added to the I/O, registry, and threading classes.
• System.Security.SecureString
• Improved SecurityException details.
• In Visual Studio 2005 – developers can test the running of their application within a certain zone (the Internet or the Intranet zone).

Out-of-Band

• Rotor – version 2 with most features will come out 3-6 months after Whidbey releases, so if Nov. 7 for Whidbey holds, we’re looking at Feb – May 2006.
• IronPython – Microsoft implementation of the dynamic language Python built on .NET Beta 2.  You already know I’m all about Python, and IronPython is even better!

You can find out more detail on what is new in the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta.