New Microsoft Developer Tools

It looks like Microsoft has come out with a host of new tools and technologies for developers.  Microsoft has had a strong influence on how controls are being done today.  These tools and technologies will almost certainly be applied in upcoming machine and process controls applications as well as in the Engineering and Design tools we use.  

Check out this blog post:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ee913545.aspx

Here are some excerpts and links from this site to give you a flavor of what is happening.

• “There are two things you should be learning right now: LINQ and XAML.”
• “I want to add a third recommendation for you to consider: the Task Parallel Library and its PLINQ extensions.”
• “LINQ”  Language-Integrated Queries – a set of extensions to the .NET Framework 3.5.  Available using Visual Studio 2008 and later development tools.
• “XAML” Extensible Application Markup Language
• “Entity Framework”  See a followup Post for what this is and how it fits in providing data access abstraction.

Additionally, the first version of “Azure” is now said to be available.  The programming environment is an extension to Microsofts Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 .NET programming environment.  Azure is Microsofts new cloud computing environment.  Once applications are developed it will allow applications to be scaled by the user.  An example cited is video rendering which takes large amounts of processing power and/or a lot of time to complete.  Rendering with Azure could be performed in minutes by using as many processors as needed from a Microsoft Azure data center to render different parts of the movie all in parellel.  Users would pay for the additional processing power only when needed.

The Microsoft developer network (MSDN) is accessed on the web at msdn.microsoft.com