Microsoft Framework 4.7.2
Desiderato Merriwether
Guiding product development towards more responsible outcomes
AI systems are the product of many different decisions made by those who develop and deploy them. From system purpose to how people interact with AI systems, we need to proactively guide these decisions toward more beneficial and equitable outcomes. That means keeping people and their goals at the center of system design decisions and respecting enduring values like fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability.
Refining our policy and learning from our product experiences
Over the course of a year, a multidisciplinary group of researchers, engineers, and policy experts crafted the second version of our Responsible AI Standard. It builds on our previous responsible AI efforts, including the first version of the Standard that launched internally in the fall of 2019, as well as the latest research and some important lessons learned from our own product experiences.
The Responsible AI Standard records the pattern we followed to improve our speech-to-text technology. As we continue to roll out the Standard across the company, we expect the Fairness Goals and Requirements identified in it will help us get ahead of potential fairness harms.
Our review of this technology through our Responsible AI program, including the Sensitive Uses review process required by the Responsible AI Standard, led us to adopt a layered control framework: we restricted customer access to the service, ensured acceptable use cases were proactively defined and communicated through a Transparency Note and Code of Conduct, and established technical guardrails to help ensure the active participation of the speaker when creating a synthetic voice. Through these and other controls, we helped protect against misuse, while maintaining beneficial uses of the technology.
Building upon what we learned from Custom Neural Voice, we will apply similar controls to our facial recognition services. After a transition period for existing customers, we are limiting access to these services to managed customers and partners, narrowing the use cases to pre-defined acceptable ones, and leveraging technical controls engineered into the services.
Finally, we recognize that for AI systems to be trustworthy, they need to be appropriate solutions to the problems they are designed to solve. As part of our work to align our Azure Face service to the requirements of the Responsible AI Standard, we are also retiring capabilities that infer emotional states and identity attributes such as gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair, and makeup.
A multidisciplinary, iterative journey
Our updated Responsible AI Standard reflects hundreds of inputs across Microsoft technologies, professions, and geographies. It is a significant step forward for our practice of responsible AI because it is much more actionable and concrete: it sets out practical approaches for identifying, measuring, and mitigating harms ahead of time, and requires teams to adopt controls to secure beneficial uses and guard against misuse. You can learn more about the development of the Standard in this video.
There is a rich and active global dialog about how to create principled and actionable norms to ensure organizations develop and deploy AI responsibly. We have benefited from this discussion and will continue to contribute to it. We believe that industry, academia, civil society, and government need to collaborate to advance the state-of-the-art and learn from one another. Together, we need to answer open research questions, close measurement gaps, and design new practices, patterns, resources, and tools.
You can install .NET Framework 4.8.1 from our .NET Framework Download site. For building applications targeting .NET Framework 4.8.1, you can download the NET Framework 4.8.1 Developer Pack. If you just want the runtime, you can use either:
.NET Framework 4.8.1 includes native support for the Arm64 architecture (Windows 11+) and accessibility improvements as well as other improvements. You can see the complete list of improvements in the .NET Framework 4.8.1 release notes.
.NET Framework 4.8.1 adds native Arm64 support to the .NET Framework family. So, your investments in the vast ecosystem of .NET Framework apps and libraries can now leverage the benefits of running workloads natively on Arm64 for better performance when compared to running x64 code emulated on Arm64.
In this release, both Windows Forms and WPF have made improvements to the handling of tooltips to enable them to be more accessible. In both cases, tooltips now comply with the guidelines setforth in the WCAG2.1 content on Hover or Focus guidance. The requirements for tooltips require the following:
In WinForms, this support is only available on Windows 11 or higher operating system. WinForms is a thin managed wrapper around the Windows API, and the new tooltip behavior only became available in Windows 11. WPF has no operating system version dependencies for their accessible tooltips.
WPF had implemented most of the requirements for WCAG2.1 compliant tooltips in .NET Framework 4.8. In this release WPF improved the experience by ensuring that a tooltip in the current window can easily be dismissed by using the ESC key, the CTRL key (by itself), or by the combination Ctrl+Shift+F10. The scope of the Escape key was reduced in this release to apply only to the current window, when previously it would have been any open tooltip in the application.
Did the system requirements change? In this blog post it lists Windows Server 2022 as the only supported server OS. But .NET 4.8 supports Windows Server 1803+, Server 2019 and Server 2022. Did a patch release of 4.8 just drop support for an entire family of server products?
.NET Framework 4.8.1 is also available on Windows 10 versions (20H2+) and Server 2022+ for x64 based devices. We realize that some customers need to stay on older OS versions for longer, so we plan to continue to support 4.8 on those OS versions for as long as the OS is in support. This means you can stay on 4.8 with the confidence that you will be fully supported with security, reliability, and compatibility fixes on 4.8 just like you would with 4.8.1.
If you have features that require OS-level support then do like you recommend everyone else do: check for OS support or break it into its own set of pieces that are independent of the core. This is going to cause so much confusion to people who, for security reasons, follow strict guidelines for upgrading to the latest patch of all software they run.
Tara Overfield said above that We realize that some customers need to stay on older OS versions for longer, so we plan to continue to support 4.8 on those OS versions for as long as the OS is in support. This means you can stay on 4.8 with the confidence that you will be fully supported with security, reliability, and compatibility fixes on 4.8 just like you would with 4.8.1.
So you can safely stay on .NET 4.8 for broader reach.
I think there may be a targeting issue. If you distribute a .NET Framework app, you can either target 4.8 (no ARM64), 4.8.1 (no older Windows versions, including supported Windows versions) or try to build/distribute for both.
The fact that I read earlier that Microsoft was going to upgrade the WebForms Visual Designer combined with this new version of the .NET Framework makes it appear that many developers and organizations are still working with the original frameworks and intend to stay with them.
However, I have worked with quite a lot in the original .NET Frameworks, including a lot of WebForms development. I have also tinkered with WCF, which I found rather easy to use compared to the projects did with the pure Remoting API. However, the feature I liked about remoting is that it a binary transfer protocol, which made it nearly impossible to breach. WCF has this as well, which if I go through with plans to build a client-server application based on my current, released application, I will probably use.
With .NET Core 5.0 and 6.0 now available I can see where Microsoft is starting to move their technologies and I can understand their reasons for doing so as .NET Core is being designed to be smaller and more modular.
However, throwing out WebForms and WCF was somewhat of a deal-breaker for me. To me, WebForms has always been the zenith of web development, which has been replaced with a a far more complex and fractured development environment with ASP.NET MVC and now ASP.NET Core. True, there have been issues with WebForms but I believe that over time all of them could have been resolved.
A former Silicon Valley engineer who left the US to live in New Zealnd, and who I corresponded with for a short time, wrote a book that demonstrated how to make WebForms applications run like greased lightening. Aside from the proper development paradigms to be used, the book was mostly oriented towards the deployment and hardware configurations, which even today many organizations ignore.
ASP.NET MVC came into vogue because it was believed that high performance web applications could be developed simply base on quality source code. This was never true and hardware and network engineers in the 1990s new at this time the fallacy of relying simply on good source code to produce high performance applications.
The .NET Framework (pronounced as "dot net") is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until being superseded by the cross-platform .NET project. It includes a large class library called Framework Class Library (FCL) and provides language interoperability (each language can use code written in other languages) across several programming languages. Programs written for .NET Framework execute in a software environment (in contrast to a hardware environment) named the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR is an application virtual machine that provides services such as security, memory management, and exception handling. As such, computer code written using .NET Framework is called "managed code". FCL and CLR together constitute the .NET Framework.
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