Make Way for Orcas -- Visual Studio Magazine

Desmond File

Make Way for Orcas

Soma Somasegar and Prashant Sridharan are a couple of the heavy-hitters behind the Visual Studio IDE. The two, along with program manager Amanda Silver, made their way through some truly awful weather to meet with us in our Framingham offices and talk about the imminent beta 1 release of Visual Studio "Orcas."

Rumors that Orcas could slip to May 15 and beyond seem to be off the mark. In fact, the beta is likely to be available very soon -- within the next few days. You can find information about Visual Studio Orcas here.

One thing is certain: Beta 1 is going to be a significant event for Visual Studio developers. There is a raft of important new technologies represented -- from the ASP.NET AJAX tooling to XAML support for working with WPF and sharing projects with Expression Studio designers, to code support for Language Integrated Query (LINQ) for advanced, programmatic data access. And that's honestly just scratching the surface.

There will be more CTPs and, Somasegar says, at least one more public beta before Orcas ships. We're told the WPF Designer (code-named "Cider") module will get a lot of work after the upcoming beta. Also, word on whether the final version of Visual Studio Orcas will include tooling for Silverlight (previously "WPF/E") won't emerge until the MIX07 conference starting on April 30.

Still, for the moment, the upcoming beta 1 gives Visual Studio early adopters plenty to work with.

Do you plan to start working with the Orcas beta 1 right away? We want to hear your takes and publish them in our next issue. Write me at [email protected] and tell us your thoughts on the beta.

Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/18/2007

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