Microsoft Delivers First Public Beta of Orcas and .NET 3.5
Pooby
beta.
Microsoft released Beta 1 of its upcoming IDE and interim framework
late last week. This next version of Visual Studio, called "Orcas" for
now, will offer developers as many as 200 new features, according to
Microsoft.
Orcas is designed to provide a development environment for Microsoft's
new and upcoming platform advances, such as those in the Windows Vista
operating system, 2007 Office System, SQL Server 2005 and Windows
"Longhorn" server. It also adds a wide breadth of tooling for
everything from back-end data connectivity and unit testing to Web
development and UI design.
Beta 1 of Orcas will not offer tooling for Silverlight, the recently
branded cross-browser plug-in technology, formerly known as Windows
Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E). However, the idea is not
off the table, according to S. "Soma" Somasegar, Microsoft's corporate
vice president, developer division.
"We are thinking about, 'Can we do Silverlight support or not?,' and
we will be able to talk more about it in a few weeks," Somasegar
said.
Microsoft's Chief Architect Ray Ozzie and General Manager of the
Development Division Scott Guthrie are expected to discuss the
development strategy for Silverlight at MIX '07, the company's
conference for Web developers and designers, which begins next week in
Las Vegas.
Some of the most anticipated functionality in Orcas is support for
Language Integration Query (LINQ), which allows developers to query
object, relational and XML data from within their programming
languages. LINQ will initially support Visual Basic and C#. (Early
adopters reported some issues with the LINQ functionality in the March
CTP.)
Orcas also integrates the ADO.NET Entity Framework, which provides new
APIs and tooling designed to support object/relational mapping.
"From a developer standpoint, [LINQ] is a slam dunk," commented
Jeffrey Hammond, analyst at Forrester Research Inc., "because it makes
data access, both structured and unstructured, very easy to put into
your code."
How developers will adapt to LINQ, which requires .NET 3.5, is still
an open question, however.
Orcas integrates AJAX tooling for the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX server-side
extensions and client-side libraries, which shipped in January. Visual
Studio functionality includes JavaScript Intellisense and debugging.
The .NET 3.5 Framework supports AJAX development in Windows
Communication Foundation and ASP.NET 2.0, according to Microsoft.
UI developers and designers can finally utilize the Windows
Presentation Foundation Designer (code-named "Cider") from within
Visual Studio. They also can take advantage of additional support for
the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), which is the markup
language in Microsoft's Expression Studio portfolio.
The 2007 Office System, which is built on .NET 3.0, allows developers
to work from a common platform. Orcas integrates Visual Studio Tools
for Office and supports Visual Studio Tools for Applications, the
embedded .NET programming environment released last month.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of Visual Studio "Orcas" is
that it supports multi-targeting, allowing developers to use a single
version of Visual Studio to program against multiple frameworks (.NET
2.0, .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5).
"This is just so important for development organizations," said
Hammond, "because otherwise you have to line your release schedules up
with the release schedules of Windows."
It is also great for Microsoft going forward, he asserted.
"It really allows them to decouple Visual Studio from the Windows
release train," Hammond said.
MSDN subscribers can download Orcas Beta 1 (Visual Studio Professional
Edition, Visual Studio Team Suite and Visual Studio Team Foundation
Server) here as installation media ISO images.