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Does anybody know of or have a detailed list of how the BCL in .NET 4.0 has changed from 3.0? In other words, what types have been added or deprecated (or how have they changed)?

All I have been able to find is the list of new features, such as the Wikipedia article, any of the endless MSDN blogs entries about it, or some questions here on SO (#1, #2). Knowing about those is important, but I am also interested in what new types we have to use.

Taking a gander using VS2010 Beta 1, I noticed a few new ones that looked interesting and fun:

  1. BigInteger
  2. Lazy<T>
  3. The whole System.Collections.Concurrent namespace.
  4. Additions to Threading such as Parallel types and Tasks namespace
  5. Charting namespace
  6. Etc...

I know that it is still in beta and things could change, but I think it's worth trying to get a leg up on learning about all the new classes now (not just the hyped-up ones).

I don't really feel like writing my own reflect-and-diff tool to generate this list, so I'm hoping the list (or the tool to generate it) already exists.

By the way, I already checked Reflector's add-ins and the Diff one (while being great) doesn't feel quite right. I think it would be great for getting down to the dirty details, but seems like overkill for just getting the list of the high-level deltas.

EDIT:

Using bdukes answer, I have created a Google Docs spreadsheet that lists all the new types in 4.0 as of Beta 1. It also contains links to the MSDN online documentation (or a Google Search for generic types since their URI is not as easy to autogenerate).

Community
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Erich Mirabal
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2 Answers2

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I doubt there's a nice compiled list out there yet (it is still a beta, as you say).

You may want to check out NDepend for a more controlled diff experience (see Patrick's post on some of the changes).

UPDATE: The BCL Team just released a blog post about what's new from them. This includes:

  • Code Contracts
  • Parallel Extensions
  • BigInteger
  • Co- & Contra-Variance
  • Tuples
  • SortedSet<T> & ISet<T>
  • File System Enumeration Improvements
  • MemoryMappedFiles
  • Registry Improvements
  • Globalization data updated to Unicode 5.1
  • ResourceManager Improvements
  • Compression Improvements
bdukes
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  • Looking through his results, I wished he had added an order-by to his queries. Still, almost exactly what I was looking for. – Erich Mirabal May 21 '09 at 13:45
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There is an article on MSDN that (although not really a concise list of deltas) does go through what is new and has pointers to more reading: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409230(VS.100).aspx (direct link to the BCL section)

Matthew Murdoch
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Fredrik Mörk
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