Is there a timewarp between here and redmond?

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The reason I wonder that is because our dev teams seem to be pumping stuff out the door so fast at the moment that I think they must have a special 27 hour working day unlike the 8 or 10 that the rest of us have.

In no particular order we have...

1) Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" - September CTP - released as a pair of Virtual PC/Server hard disks. What a nice touch that is - will save people from trashing their machines. I'm downloading them now. I'm particularly intrigued by "The ability to control the garbage collector’s latency mode".

2) Next up we have the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition Beta. This introduces support for Office 2007 development. I'm still trying to get to grips with the new UI in Office 2007, let alone developing apps for it. If you are looking for more information the VSTO Portal could be a good place to start.

3) Next off the production line we have Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals CTP 5 - Beta. Sounds really good - if you're into data. I'm mostly a "select * from table" kinda person.

4) Then we have Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Beta which Soma blogged about the other day. As Soma says, you need to register at the connect site to download that one.

5) With slightly less fanfare than everything else we also have Domain-Specific Language Tools v1.0 which looks very interesting and is also on my list of things to take a look at.

6) Meanwhile over in the ASP.NET realm the September Atlas Control Toolkit has been released.

7) And as the development of Vista goes on apace, each release includes the latest build of IIS7, now up to IIS7 RC1. This is interesting for web developers as, although IIS7 will not ship as an available server platform for production web sites until Longhorn ships, developers can start developing for IIS7 today by using Vista. There is a good section about IIS7 at IIS.NET.

8) Also, not long ago, Iron Python 1.0 was released which should be useful in its own right for people into Iron Python but also serves as an example of how to use the  "new dynamic language features that we added into the CLR with last year's .NET 2.0 release". I have to confess this is a feature of 2.0 I was blissfully unaware of.

9) Then there is the Microsoft .NET Micro Framework (beta). That sounds very whacky! Could it be our first product to feature "Micro" twice in the product name?

10) Then there is the Microsoft Pre-Release Software Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 - Release Candidate - useful if you want to start developing applications with Visual Studio 2005 or the Express SKUs that target .NET 3.0.

11) And if you are into Workflow how about Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Extensions for Windows® Workflow Foundation Release Candidate 5? (needs the .NET 3.0 RC1 or Vista RC1).

 

Phew! That's a lot of stuff. I for one am not sure when I am going to find time to look at it all, so I don't know how those folks in Redmond find the time to develop it!

 

Bye for now

 

Doug