Alex is discussing the September 2006 CTP of Visual Studio “Orcas” and ends with “The next CTP should bring more.”. Well, the next CTP is available. You’ll see a number of improvements made compared to the last CTP. Here are a few that peeked my interest.
- Enhanced the existing .Net Data Provider to work with the new features in ADO.Net 3.0 such as LINQ and object services;
- Developers can build can create scripts as actual programs –instead of VBS scripts- that are still completely self-contained in a single file and can be trivially modified, compiled and executed in any environment that has .NET installed.
- Core functionality of the XLinq API such as load, modify, and save XML documents
- The current DateTime is insufficient at specifying an exact point in time. DateTimeOffset represents a date time with an offset. It is not meant to be a replacement for DateTime; it should be used in scenarios involving absolute points in time. DateTimeOffset includes most of the functionality of the current DateTime API and allows seamless conversion to DateTime as well.
- HashSet is a new generic collection that has been added to the System.Collections.Generic namespace. It is an unordered collection that contains unique elements. In addition to the standard collection operations, HashSet provides standard set operations such as union, intersection, and symmetric difference.
It’s a good thing these CTP’s are made available as a VPC image. After downloading the image (and if you’ve not done so already, also the base) you only need to run it in Virtual PC or Virtual Server and you’re all set.