Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie posts about coming service updates to client-side .NET (Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation). He says we can expect:

• A new, quicker and more efficient setup framework
• 25%-40% faster start-up for applications using .NET 2.0 and higher, and smaller runtime footprint
• More hardware acceleration in WPF, plus better video performance and data-handling improvements
• A DataGrid, Ribbon, and Calendar/DatePicker for WPF
• Improved WPF designer for Visual Studio 2008

These address common real-world complaints. I’m sceptical; when version 1.0 of the .NET Framework came out, Microsoft said it was working to reduce the runtime memory footprint for Windows Forms applications, but it never happened. Let’s hope this time it will be different.