Visual Studio code name
“Orcas” delivers on Microsoft’s vision of smart client applications by enabling
developers to rapidly create connected applications that deliver the highest
quality rich user experiences. This new version enables any size organization to
rapidly create more secure, manageable, and more reliable applications that take
advantage of Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System. By building these new
types of applications, organizations will find it easier than ever before to
capture and analyze information so that they can make effective business
decisions.

This download is the January 2007 Community Technology
Preview of Microsoft Visual Studio Code-Named “Orcas”. This CTP is available in
English only.

Note: This CTP is available as a Virtual PC image
or as a self-extracting
install. If you wish to use the Virtual PC image you will need Virtual PC or
Virtual Server to run this image. If you wish to use the self extracting
install, we advise that you do not install this on a production machine.
Depending on your hardware the download files make take between 30-60 minutes to
decompress.

This CTP targets early adopters of the Microsoft
technology, platform, and tools offerings. It enables developers to experience
the upcoming toolset and underlying platform improvements. We designed this
release to enable developers try out new technology and product changes, but not
to build production systems. This limitation is fully covered in the EULA that
accompanies this CTP.

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:
  • Query Expressions
  • Object and Collection Initializers
  • Extension Methods
  • 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:
  • Query Expressions
  • Object Initializers
  • Extension Methods
  • Local Variable Type Inference
  • Anonymous Types

• 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.

Existing CTPs: As Visual
Studio code name “Orcas” CTPs are released on a predefined cadence, existing
CTPs (such as the LINQ May 2006 CTP) may not yet have been integrated into a
given “Orcas” CTP release (This should not be taken as a change in commitment to
any existing technology that has been made available as a CTP but instead is
just a real world example of how large applications, with many technology areas,
are built. We will be integrating this existing functionality into future CTP
builds.

Developers using a VPC image can run the CTP on a machine
without impacting any existing software installations. The CTP can be removed by
deleting the folder and using the Virtual PC application to remove the
configuration information.

This image ships with networking set to
“local”. This setting enables the virtual machine to think it is connected to a
network without actually connecting and exposing the machine to the Internet. We
recommend that customers do not modify the networking settings. Customers who
wish to turn networking “on” to connect the image to a physical network are
advised that they will need to ensure the security of the virtual machine as
well as apply any security updates that may have become available since the
release of this image.