.NET 4, do you know the new features? - Introduction

imageAs part of my work ahead of Microsoft Tech·Ed Africa 2011, I did an online, anonymous poll to see how well known the new features in .NET 4 are—and over the next few days, I thought I would share my findings.

The poll asked you to state, for feature X: Do you know it? And if you do know it, is it a useful feature?

I listed 61 features that are new in .NET 4—which pretty much covered its length and breadth. There is some consolidation: All of Workflow is one item, but WF4 is a rewrite, so it’s one BIG new feature, with some other aspects of consolidation.

I suspected a fairly high rate of known features because .NET 4 was released 16 months ago (12 April 2010) and has been demoed and talked about a lot—even I have done talks on the new features. However, the ratio of unknown to known is 1.2:1, so while there is close parity, there are more unknown than known features—which surprised me a bit.

I’ve broken up the results into a series because I wanted to discuss each feature briefly; a single post would have been MASSIVE.

Below are links to the other parts of the series:

Finally, I want to say a BIG thanks to everyone who answered and those who shared links on social networks and with friends!

The raw data can be found below.

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