Introduction

Who This Book Is For

This book is an overview of all the important features in .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012. We believe that by providing introductory content and easy-to-read, hello-world-type examples, readers will be made aware of the opportunities available in this release and want to explore them in more detail.

How This Book Is Structured

We have split the book into a number of different chapters, each exploring a different area of .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012:

• Chapter 1 Introduction: overview of NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 including the dominant themes within this release
• Chapter 2 IDE Improvements: features that will benefit all users, such as Quick Launch, preview tabs, new search options, improved multi-monitor support, and test runners
• Chapter 3 The BCL and the CLR: covers what’s new in the BCL and the CLR.
• Chapter 4 MEF 2 in 4.5: support for open generic types, defining parts through convention using the new RegistrationBuilder, changes to parts lifetime management, and MEF for Windows 8 and web apps.
• Chapter 5 Language: writing async code in .NET and tweaks made to VB.NET language
• Chapter 6 ASP.NET 4.5: model binding, better HTML5 support, validation and encoding tweaks, performance enhancements, and WebSockets support
• Chapter 7 ASP.NET MVC 4: new display mode API, improved default templates, and Razor syntax tweaks
• Chapter 8 Windows Communication Foundation and Web API: new features in WCF, primarily focused around Web API and WebSockets
• Chapter 9 Data: takes a quick look at LocalDb, what is in new in System.Data and finally what is new and improved in Entity Framework 5.0.
• Chapter 10 Windows Azure: introduction to Windows Azure
• Chapter 11 Windows Workflow Foundation: covers improvements to the designer experience, the introduction of C# expressions and how to version workflows using the new WorkflowIdentity class.
• Chapter 12 WPF: new features of WPF available with .NET 4.5
• Chapter 13 Silverlight 5: changes made from Silverlight 4 to Silverlight 5
• Chapter 14 Windows 8 Applications: introduction to Windows 8 including how to create Windows store applications in C# and XAML

Downloading the Code

We have made the longer code examples available online so that you don’t have to type them in. These examples are available at Alex Mackey’s web site: www.simpleisbest.co.uk/vs2012.

Contacting the Author

If you have any feedback or spot a mistake, the authors can be contacted at the following addresses:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]