I'm pleased to announce that Bill Gates -- in his keynote speech at COMDEX
tonight a few moments ago -- just announced that Beta1 of the .NET Framework
SDK, ASP.NET and Visual Studio.NET are now available for public download.
This marks a key milestone in our march to establish the new .NET Platform.
You can now download and install the .NET Framework SDK (including ASP.NET)
from http://msdn.microsoft.com/net.
MSDN Universal Subscribers can also
download Visual Studio.NET from the Universal Subscriber Downloads section
as well.
For those of you with limited bandwidth, you can order CDs of the betas to
be sent to you (for a minor charge to cover shipping) from the below URLs:
We have deliberately focused on quality with this release, rather than make
it a date driven event. I know a number of people have found the time delay
from the Preview Release frustrating -- but we think it will be worth the
wait. Our goal with Beta1 is to ensure that we "enable the development
experience with the platform" -- meaning that there should be nothing
stopping developers from developing great .NET applications.
Installing Notes:
Please make sure you completely uninstall the preview release (by running
the uninstall program that it shipped with) before installing beta1. As
with all betas, there are standard caveats with installing on systems with
existing betas (the standard line with beta software is that you should
clean the machine before upgrading). However, we believe that you should be
able to upgrade simply by uninstalling the preview sdk and installing the
beta1 sdk.
Important Note: those users who have the preview edition of the visual
studio.net IDE (ie: those who went to the PDC) should definitely consider
reinstalling their system (I've seen a few firsthand upgrade scenarios where
the debugger stops working, etc).
ASP+ to ASP.NET Name Change:
One of the first things you'll notice when installing the beta1 bits is that
ASP+ is no longer called ASP+. Instead, we've made a slight name change
with Beta1 -- to ASP.NET instead. Ultimately we felt that this name more
tightly linked the product to the overall .NET Framework. It doesn't imply
any technical direction change -- just a marketing thing.
ASP.NET Web Site:
When making the name change, we also took the opportunity to acquire the
http://www.asp.net URL (just type "asp.net" in your address bar in IE to get
there). Our goal is to use the site as a central place that we can point
new users interested in downloading the bits and obtaining pointers to more
about the product -- specifically containing pointers to all of the ASP.NET
community sites as well as published books and magazines. Our goal with the
site is to drive additional traffic towards the great ASP.NET content
centers out there today. Our plan will be to go live with the site Monday
or Tuesday (November 13th or 14th). Start pointing your friends to it to get started with the
product.
ASP.NET Beta1 Platform Support:
ASP.NET Beta1 will now work on both NT4 (with IIS4) and Win2k (with IIS5).
Note that our testing in the Beta1 timeframe has been more rigorous on Win2k
than NT4 (this will be fixed for beta2 and RTM) -- so the "best" OS to run
ASP.NET on in Beta1 will still be Win2k. However, those of you who
previously couldn't play with ASP.NET because it only ran on Win2k no longer
have an excuse. ;-)
Note that the client pieces of the .NET Framework (WinForms, Data, XML, etc)
will also work on Win98, WinME, NT4 and Win2k (as will Visual Studio.NET).
Updated QuickStarts and Sample Applications:
Beta1 contains a much expanded .NET Framework Quickstart (now with
Javascript samples, VB as the primary sample language, etc). In all it now
contains almost 900 samples -- and is a great way to get started with the
product. IBuySpy -- available at http://www.ibuyspy.com -- has also been
updated for Beta1 (you can download it now). Note that with the Beta1
release we've also updated IBuySpy so that it can automatically install
against either SQL Server or MSDE -- so everyone with the SDK should be able
to run it fine (since MSDE is available as part of the SDK).
In addition, we will also have a "Intranet Portal" sample available soon.
We'll send out pointers to it shortly. We think you will be very impressed
with it (it is going to be *really* cool).
Known Bugs:
Although we fixed about every bug we knew about with Beta1 -- there was
one that we were unable to "safely fix" in the Beta1 timeframe. This is the
application unloading bug that also existed in the PDC release, and results
in a memory leak every time a web application is reset (ie: a file is
changed in the bin directory, global.asax is updated, or a config file is
modified on a running application). Note that this bug does not effect
running applications in production (you only run into it when actively
making changes to an application).
We have just checked in the fix to the Beta2 tree -- however, we deemed the
resolution too big a change to attempt for beta1 (we want a few weeks
coverage on it before we declared it fully resolved). As a result, for
Beta1 you will probably see the memory usage of the xspwp.exe process being
higher than expected as a result. Note that the ASP.NET process model in
Beta1 will automatically detect and recover from this leak once the process
grows beyond 40% of the total virtual memory size of the system -- so
hopefully most users will remain somewhat oblivious to the issue. However,
I just wanted to give people a heads up in case you were wondering why the
product seemed a bit memory hungry.
Summary:
Thank you for all your support and patience! We think this release marks an
important milestone. We hope you find it does too. :-)
- Scott
