Developing Azure .Net 4.0 Applications

Question

Presently .Net 4.0 is not supported on Azure.

This thread indicates that you will not be able to use .Net 4.0 with VS 2010 until it is supported in the cloud. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com

I'd like a way to start developing Azure applications locally utilizing the new features of .Net 4.0. I am fine with not being able to deploy these applications until Azure officially supports it.

From within the VS IDE; I tried replacing .Net 3.5 application references with newer .Net 4.0 references and Visual Studio crashes.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks, Paul

Answer 1

Some features from .NET 4.0 can be added to your application through other means. For example, the recently-released Reactive Extensions for .NET 3.5 SP1 includes a back ported release of Parallel Extensions. And the Managed Extensibility Framework contains the Lazy class and Tuple struct. As long as you set "Copy Local" to true on any libraries that you add, your application should run (and deploy) successfully.

Obviously, these aren't all the features that are new in .NET 4.0, and not all of them will can be ported back to .NET 3.5 like these can.