Visual Studio "Orcas" + Features of Orcas + Introduction to LINQ + Download Orcas CTP

Visual Studio "Orcas" is the next version of Visual Studio and this article provides a preview of the features and why it is compelling to work with.

Visual Studio "Orcas" The next version of Visual Studio is getting ready and stated for release later this year. Visual Studio "Orcas" presents unlimited capabilities and features which can make a developer's life more productive than ever.Lets have a peek into the list of features

Features of Visual Studio "Orcas"
.NET Framework 3.5 (includes support for 3.0, 2.0 versions) - You can write applications which target any of these versions and Visual Studio would automatically filter intellisense, toolbox controls, and add reference dialog items (among other things) to only show those features supported within that specific version of the framework. You can then compile against each of these different framework releases, as well as get full debugging support for each.

• Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation (Currently this can be downloaded separately for Visual Studio 2005 from here)
• Windows SDK and .NET 3.0 Runtime Components (Currently this can be downloaded separately from here)
• Extensions for WCF, WPF (Currently this can be downloaded separately from here)
• ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 (Again, can be downloaded currently from here)All of the above, improved and with much more features and capabilties.
• Expression Blend is specifically designed for thisSplit View of Design and CodeRich support for CSS .... and much much more.

LINQ Support One of the main things, I didnt mention is the support for LINQ. Will talk about it in a later post, but, it would definitely take programming languages to the next level of capabilities, what, with the support for querying Collections, Database and XML - all in the same way we are used to - SQL.

For More Features Check Scott Guthrie's post here.

Download Visual Studio "Orcas" The "Orcas" CTP can be downloaded from here It comes out it two forms, a pre-configured VPC as well as an individual tool download. It can work side by side with Visual Studio 2005.