Visual Studio ORCAS CTP is available
Visual Studio ORCAS January CTP is available for download now, you can either download it as an
installable bits or as a
Virtual PC image.
The highlights of this CTP include:
- Extended, more powerful data APIs with the ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to ADO.NET
- With the ADO.NET Entity Framework developers will be able to
model the view of the data that is appropriate for each one of the
applications they are building, independently of the structure of the
data in the underlying database. The use of the Entity Data Model (EDM)
enables developers to design models that follow the concepts built into
the application, instead of having to map them to constructs available
in relational stores. Once the model is in place, the powerful ADO.NET
Entity Framework API is used to access and manipulate the data as .NET
classes or as rows and columns, whatever is appropriate for each
application.
- ADO.NET is fully integrated with LINQ and offers many options
for using LINQ in various scenarios: LINQ to SQL provides direct access
to database tables from the programming environment, LINQ to Entities
enables developers to use LINQ over EDM models, and LINQ to DataSet
allows the full expressivity of LINQ to be used over DataSets.
- C# 3.0 Language Support: This CTP implements all of the C#3.0 language features from the May LINQ CTP including:
- Object and Collection Initializers
- Local Variable Type Inference and Anonymous Types
- Lambdas bound to Delegates and Expression trees
- VB 9.0 Language Support: This CTP implements all of the VB 9.0 language features from the May LINQ CTP including:
- Local Variable Type Inference
- LINQ to Objects API
- The LINQ to Objects API supports queries over any .NET
collection, such as arrays and Generic Lists. This API is defined in
the System.Linq namespaces inside System.Core.dll. Click here for more details about LINQ.
- ClickOnce improvements
- This CTP delivers ClickOnce improvements for the deployment of
Windows Presentation Foundation applications, alternative browser
support and ISV rebranding.
- Managed classes for Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm cryptographic functionality
- With the addition of these classes, cryptographic developers
now have managed classes for Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman secret
agreement and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm signing. These
classes are built on the new CNG cryptographic libraries in Windows
Vista, but still follow the familiar patterns of the cryptographic
classes in .NET Framework 2.0.
- Runtime and design-time support for Office 2007 (including Outlook 2007)
- Customers can build managed code add-ins with a consistent
development experience, regardless of which version of Office they
target, which Office application(s) they target, and which programming
language they choose. Managed code add-ins enable developers to use
strongly-typed class members, with the help of modern development
tools, including intellisense and auto-complete. Additionally add-ins
can potentially run in multiple versions of Office, enabled by
abstracting version-specific code and supported by a version-resilient
infrastructure.
- Support for advanced lifetime management of add-ins and their AppDomains
- We’ve added the helper classes that manage the lifetime of
add-ins, the objects passed between the host and add-ins, and even of
the AppDomains the add-ins live in. By using the ContractBase and
LifetimeToken handle, pipeline developer can let the hosts and add-ins
act as if everything, including the AppDomain the add-in was activated
in, was controlled by the garbage collector even though .Net Remoting
would normally make that impossible.
- Client service support for Login/Logout, Role management and Profiles
- ASP.NET 2.0 shipped with new application services for
authentication, authorization and personalization. Most of these
services are not tied to ASP.NET and can work in non-web applications.
This CTP enables the use of these services in smart client applications
for Logon/Logoff, Role management and profiles.
- A trace listener that logs event to ETW, event tracing for Windows in Vista
- Event tracing for windows is greatly improved in Vista and the
most performant loggings facility available in Windows. The
System.Diagnostics.EventProviderTraceListener allows managed tracing to
provide events to the Vista’s ETW infrastructure. This is a highly
performant, thread-safe listener.
- Jscript Intellisense support
- Jscript code formatting and Intellisense support provide
developers with a richer editing experience. These improvements enable
the IDE to provide statement completion, color syntax highlighting and
in-place documentation to Jscript and associated script models such as
ASP.NET AJAX.
- A new numeric type that provides support for very large numbers (Beyond the range of In64)
- All existing numeric types in the Framework have a limited
range. This is the first type that supports arbitrary range and will
extend to accommodate any large number as needed. This type lives in
the new System.Numeric namespace where all new numeric and arithmetic
features are going to reside. It supports all the basic arithmetic
operations including things like Pow, DivRem and GreatestCommonDivisor.
It implements the following interfaces: IFormattable, IComparable,
IComparable<BigInteger> and IEquatable<BigInteger>. It is
serliazable and immutable. It has implicit casts from all basic
integral types and explicit casts to/from all numeric type. To learn
more about this type – please visit the BCL team blog.
- LINQ over XML (XLinq)
- Enable further LINQ over XML feature support (in addition to
the functionality available in the Oct 2006 CTP) such as the ability to
apply XLST to transform into and out of XLinq trees, support for
System.XML reader/writer interfaces for improved XML sharing with DOM
applications and System.XML schema validation for XLinq nodes.
- SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE)
- SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE) provides a local relational
data store for occasionally connected client applications from desktops
to devices. SSCE is light weight, embeddable and is easy to deploy with
your client applications without requiring complex administration work
from users. Timestamp (row version id) data type, improved table
designer, Query processor enhancements and support for local
transaction scope are some of the new features you find in this version
of SSCE.
Download installable bits from hereDownload Virtual PC Image from here