Visual Studio 'Orcas' looks promising

Having spent the last year or so getting to grips with Visual Studio 2005 and establishing ASP.Net migration paths from .Net 1.1 to .Net 2/3 (especially when you are considering shared hosting, third party components, Oracle's ODP.Net/ODT etc), I'm now starting to investigate the next incarnation of VS, aka project 'Orcas'/.Net 3.5).

Scheduled for an estimated release in the 2nd half of this year, it will offer many features that we will all be keen to get our hands on:

- Full 'integrated' LINQ support
- AJAX support (environment support for this is improving all the time)
- Target .Net 2, 3 and 3.5 from the same environment
- Split WYSIWYG/code editor and rapid code/design view switching
- Nested master pages
- WPF project types
- Much improved (and W3C standards based!) CSS support.
- Improvements on code editing, intellisense and debugging (e.g. editing Javascript will support 'type inferencing').

If you want to take a sneak preview, you can download the January 2007 CTP, but (unless you are desperate!) I'd probably wait until the February 2007 CTP which will include the new WYSIWYG designer features mentioned above. Note the downloads are 'thoughtfully' provided as Virtual PC images (similar to VMware), so you will need to download/install Virtual PC first. A great way of evaluating s/w without breaking your day-to-day development environment.

And for those like me having to consider migration paths on corporate desktops... the road from VS 2005 to 'Orcas' looks a lot easier than the 'one way wizard upgrade approach' we had with VS 2003 to VS 2005. From what I have read, you 'should be able to simply' open up VS 2005 solutions. Time will tell if this is the reality...

For more information, see Scott's 'First look at Orcas' piece (which includes some screenshots)