Visual Studio "Orcas" and Beyond

author Black Marble calendar Mar 3, 2007 · 2 min read · Uncategorised  ·
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Until recently there has been little or no information about Orcas unless you are actively looking , what has been noticeable over the last few weeks is that the DPE crowd at Microsoft in the UK and PM's from corp have been blogging more and more prolifically. Last month is did a brief overview of Orcas and the rest of the current developer technologies , my feeling from the preparation for the talk is there is enough of a "Message" to get out to the developer domain about Vista and .NET 3.0 and so talking futures as well was a step to much.

There is not a lot of discussion about the release date of Orcas ( the year has not been appended to the name , so I guess it is not fixed) , but as the features of Orcas are tied to the Vista wave quite heavily , my guess is that the aim is for as soon as possible.

The March CTP is out ( I feel like the last of the 10,000 to say that )

This is a step change compared to previous CTP's of Visual Studio and the LINQ previews.

Quick Feature List (Languages)

  • Query expressions
  • Object initializers
  • Extension methods
  • Type inference (VB)
  • Anonymous types (VB)
  • XML literals (VB)
  • XML access members (VB)

IDE

  • Support for WPF , WF
  • Better ASP editing
  • XSLT debugging ( WOO HOO )

Project

  • Office 2007
  • WPF / ( no WPF/e ! )

Misc

  • Multiprocessor Build !!!
  • and more

on a related note I noticed that I was still calling various LINQ parts by their old names so to help here is the current naming of LINQ

LINQ to ADO.NET, which includes:

            LINQ to DataSet

            LINQ to Entities

            LINQ to SQL (formerly DLinq)

LINQ support for other data types include:

            LINQ to XML (formerly XLinq)

            LINQ to Objects

I am just off to try the XSLT debugger :) and then to play with Team Architect

go and get it

VSTS Virtual PC Image
TFS Virtual PC Image
VSTS Self-extracting Install
TFS Self-extracting Install

I would strongly recommend still using the VSTS VPC image ( It's not even a beta people ! )

b.