Enterprise Etc Adventures and Insights of a .Net Developer

For those of you drinking from the Microsoft developer firehose, there have been some significant releases, recently.

Microsoft Parallel Extensions
Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework is a managed programming model for data parallelism, task parallelism, and coordination on parallel hardware unified by a common work scheduler. Parallel Extensions makes it easier for developers to write programs that scale to take advantage of parallel hardware by providing improved performance as the numbers of cores and processors increase without having to deal with many of the complexities of todayʼs concurrent programming models.

Volta
"Volta is an evolving research project focused on exploring ways to innovate data-intensive programming models. Volta is currently exploring a lean-programming inspired toolkit for building web-based and mobile applications by stretching the .NET programming model to cover the Cloud.

Entity Framework Beta 3
There were a number of changes to the Entity Framework between Beta 2 and Beta 3 that will require updates to existing source code. These breaking changes can be found here including the mitigation for adjusting to the new behavior, and a side by side comparison of Beta 2 code and Beta 3 code.

Xbox 360 Fall 2007 Dashboard Update
Um, did we mention DivX / XviD support? For free? Oh, we did. Well, we're still reeling. (Yep, we successfully tested both codecs using .divx and .avi files.)