As part of my work ahead of Microsoft Tech·Ed Africa 2011 I did a online, anonymous poll to see how well known are the new features in .NET 4, 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 the length and breadth of it. There is some consolidation, like ALL of Workflow is one item but WF4 is a rewrite so pretty much is one BIG new feature and 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 it has been demo’d and talked about a lot - even I have done a talks on the new features. However the ratio of unknown to known is 1.2 : 1 – so while there is a close parity, there are more are unknown than known, which surprised me a bit.
I have broken up talking about the results into a series, because I want to talk about each feature briefly so a single post would have been MASSIVE.
Below are links to the other parts of the series:
- Top 10 least known features.
- The 12 features the majority thinks are useless.
- Top 10 most useful features.
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.