What’s new in the BCL in .net 4.0 beta 2

Check out this post about what’s new in the BCL in .net 4.0. beta 2. As you can see there is a good amount of timesaving functionality.

My favorites are Stream.CopyTo, String.Concat/Join overloads that take IEnumerable<T> (no more casting IList to Array!) and of course Enum.HasFlag which I already implemented it my way.

I wonder though why they created Environment.Is64BitProcess and Is64BitOperatingSystem. At the present time it makes sense but Microsoft is already talking about 128 bit Windows OS. We’ll get, I suppose, a couple of years after a 128 bit Windows is released new properties: Environment.Is128BitProcess and Is128BitOperatingSystem and years after that perhaps 256 bit versions of them.

So, wouldn’t it be easier to have an enum like:

enum Bitness
{
    16Bit,
    32Bit,
    64Bit
}

And when 128 bit version comes out a new value of 128Bit might be added. So we might have Environment.ProcessBits and Environment.OSBits or something that would return Bitness enum, would be future proof and easier to use than inspecting all IsXXXBitXXX methods.

Or perhaps, if adding a new value to an enum poses some kind of problem, just return an int instead of an enum representing the number of bits.