Farewell code access security policy (and others things deprecated in .NET 4.0)

At this writing, Microsoft is still has a lot of work to do in articulating their revamped security model. Here is what I gather from what 2 Microsoft employees involved in CLR security: Andrew Dai and Shawn Farkas. CAS policy is being deprecated in favor of Level 2 Security Transparency. Non-hosted applications, e.g. a WinForms app, will be fully trusted when run locally or over the local network. Microsoft is recommending use of policy be implemented and managed outside of the CLR itself. Hosted applications such as in ASP.NET will still have the ability to run as a partially trusted application. In essence Microsoft is trying to simplify the security model. In the end, I think a more understandable model will be utilized more. As an ASP.NET developer I hope to see more ASP.NET applications running as partially trusted in the future.


Surprisingly, ASP.NET Ajax client side libraries are deprecated. Microsoft is open sourcing its Ajax client library and making JQuery the “the primary way to develop client-side Ajax applications using Microsoft technologies.” This come from a post on Stephen Walther’s blog. I think this is a great decision, having long favored JQuery myself. Given all of Microsoft’s efforts in creating its Ajax library , switching to JQuery is also a ballsy decision.


Microsoft continues to publicly support WebForms and MVC but a closer look at the new features in each suggests otherwise. MVC has new features like Areas, data annotations, and asynchronous controllers. In web forms, allowing developers control over the ID of form fields when using server controls is a huge deal. It was a frustrating experience to deal with the ID mangling done previously. Greater control over viewstate is another very useful change. Having server controls emit clean css-based markup is also important. I see these as bugfixes, not the introduction of new features. True new features are basically absent within WebForms.
There is a lot of exciting stuff in .NET 4.0 but it is always interesting to see what the casualties are.