What arrived with the .NET Framework 4.0
Each major release of the .NET Framework shifts the way developers work. The 4.0 release was no exception, and its direction is worth understanding even if you are learning on an older version.
The themes of that release
- Simpler configuration, with less ceremony needed to get an application running.
- Better support for parallel work, so a program can use more than one processor core.
- Continued work on the web stack, making common page tasks shorter to write.
- A more capable language sitting on top, which is covered in the companion note.
Learn the ideas, not the version number. Frameworks change every few years. The underlying ideas, a request, a response, a data source, a page lifecycle, stay useful across all of them. The language note follows the same principle.
If you are working through the lessons here on a later version, nothing breaks. The language basics and the web lessons apply just as well.