What is C# 5 and where does it come from?

I know C# 3.5 is used with VS2008 and .NET 3.5.
Also C# 4 is part of VS2010 and .Net 4.0 .
But what is C# 5? What IDE?

At the recent PDC, Anders announced:

• We plan to release a "C# 5" product and a "VB 11" product. The exact names of the products have not been announced yet to my knowledge
• We intend that the "big ticket" feature of C# 5 and VB 11 will be improved asynchronous programming.
• A prototype version of the "async" feature is available for public download now.
• We plan to at some future date release a "compiler as a service" API for C# and VB. You should not expect that to ship at the same time as C# 5 / VB 11; they are separate products.

Anders specifically did not announce:

• When we plan to ship any of these products
• What "ship vehicle" they will go out in; we have not announced a new version of the IDE or the CLR.
• What additional features, if any, will be added to C# 5 or VB 11.

For more information on the async feature in C#, check out the C# dev center or read my Async articles on the subject.

It's not released yet. Parts of it was presented at this year's PDC (professional developer conference). You can see Anders Hejlsberg's talk online where he explains the new async features that will end up in C# 5.0 when it is released (no dates yet)

I heard in an announcement that C# 5 comes from Microsoft in Beijing.

• Asynchronous methods
• Compiler as a service

At the moment I can't find information about .NET 5 or in which IDE it will be released.

More info can be found on the MSDN Forums.

>http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/csharplanguage/thread/00cc045a-f9e6-402c-bffb-feb4fe1e0611/

>http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/csharplanguage/thread/00cc045a-f9e6-402c-bffb-feb4fe1e0611/

In case people still following this question. It seems the next framework version will be 4.5 and the next VS version will be 11. I am not sure why it is not 2011, probably because it is 2012 now and it is still in technology preview.

What's New for Visual C# in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. This prerelease will end on June 30, 2012.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh156499(v=vs.110).aspx

.NET Framework 4.5 Beta

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/hh854779.aspx