The NCL team has released their list of new networking features for .Net framework 4 beta 2. A partial summary of the features is:

• Opening socket connections using the DNS name of the machine
• Opening socket connections for IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously
• Using SSL for authentication only
• Setting 64-bit values for the HTTP Range header
• Setting the Date and Host headers on HttpWebRequest
• New performance counters for HttpWebRequest
• Supporting escaped characters embedded in URIs

New networking features don’t automatically show up in WCF. Some features aren’t applicable, either because we don’t use the protocol or because an existing WCF feature already solves the problem, but for the most part we’ll be waiting for you to tell us if there’s something important to support to improve your applications. You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) wait for beta 2 to actually be available to start asking.