As you probably know, we're on our way to a new version of the .NET Framework. There's so much that is new in it you could hardly know where to start. I'm just letting the information wash over me in other people's blogs, and trying things out with the beta from time to time. I spotted two related things in the last little while.

First was Improvements to Interop Marshaling in V4: IL Stubs Everywhere on the CLR team blog. The takeaways here are faster performance, consistency between the 32 and 64 bit worlds, and better debugging. Since there is still a lot of native code hiding underneath your managed calls to library functions, everyone cares about the faster performance aspect. Read the post for all the details if interop matters to you the way it matters to me.

Second was COM Interop Gets Much Better in C# 4.0 on DevX. I've always avoided C# for COM interop work because it doesn't do optional parameters, and most COM work is rich in them, especially working with Office, which I used to do quite a lot of. Less casting, no need for PIAs, no more fake values called "missing" or some variant thereof ... it's all good. And here again the magic words "improved performance".

Two small things to note with a non-small impact on your life as a developer.

Kate