By Greg DeMichillie [bio]
Posted: Jun. 9, 2008

The following an excerpt of a Product Roadmap report published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

The .NET Framework is a software component for running and loading applications and is the core of most of Microsoft's strategic developer products. It consists of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR), a set of Base Class Libraries (BCL) that provides functions broadly useful across different types of applications, and a variety of domain-specific libraries.

.NET Framework 1.0 was the first release and shipped in Apr. 2002. Mainstream support for the first release ended July 10, 2007, with Extended support available through July 14, 2009.

.NET Framework 1.1 was a minor update that offered Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) support along with performance and scalability improvements. It shipped in July 2003 and Mainstream support for version 1.1 ends Oct. 14, 2008.

.NET Framework 2.0 was a major update that shipped with Visual Studio (VS) 2005. It included new versions of ASP.NET, support for 64-bit processors, as well as generics—a programming language feature that makes it easier for a developer to create reusable data structures. Mainstream support ends April 12, 2011.

.NET Framework 3.0 uses the same CLR as the .NET Framework 2.0 but added a set of components formerly known as WinFX: the Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows CardSpace. The .NET Framework 3.0 shipped with Windows Vista, as well as in a separate add-on for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, in Jan. 2007. Mainstream support will end Apr. 10, 2012.

.NET Framework 3.5 shipped with VS 2008 and includes a major update to Microsoft's data access libraries, including Language Integrated Query (LINQ), a feature that makes it easier for programmers to query relational databases as well as XML data. It uses the same CLR as the .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0.

.NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is in beta testing as of June 2008 as part of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and it is planned for release in late summer 2008. It will deliver significant new components for Web application programming and data access, including ASP.NET Dynamic Data (enabling quick creation of Web applications from databases), the ADO.NET Entity Framework (data modeling to simplify data access code maintenance and portability), and ADO.NET Data Services (easing creation of Web services to simplify data access from Web client applications). A streamlined installer and a subset of the .NET Framework for client applications (called the client profile) will simplify deployment of the .NET Framework to PCs.

Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework 3.5, in preview as of June 2008, aim to exploit the parallelism provided by CPUs with multiple processor cores. They focus on what Microsoft describes as the "low-hanging fruit" of parallelism: encouraging developers to find the sections of their applications that can be easily made to run in parallel.

.NET Framework 4 (not an official name) will ship in 2009 or 2010 as part of the "Oslo" wave of products that includes Visual Studio 10 and BizTalk Server V6 (neither are official names).