What .NET 4.5 features are unavailable for applications developed for Windows 7 (aside from the Metro APIs)?

Question

I want to start using .NET 4.5 (C# 5.0) in my applications as soon as it is officially released, and am developing applications in Visual Studio 2010 for Windows 7.

I know that the Metro APIs are only available for Windows 8, but are there any other APIs / language features I will be unable to use?

(I am particularly keen to use the async stuff and WCF 4.5.)

Thanks <333

Answer 1

According to Scott Hanselman's video on SignalR (http://www.asp.net/vnext/overview/videos/signalr-and-web-sockets), WebSockets are only supported in IIS8, so SignalR will gracefully downgrade to a supported protocol.

Other than that, I'm not aware of any application features (aside from Metro Apps) that require both Windows8/Server2012 and .NET 4.5.

On the support level, Automatic ngen is a Windows-8-only feature: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh691758.aspx

You shouldn't have any problems with async, since that's a threading and compiler feature, and threading-bugs aside, should be platform agnostic.

Regards, Michael