Visual Studio Express Orcas Available

The first Community Technology Preview of all four Visual Studio Express "Orcas" products are available for download now. You can go to Channel 9 to see Soma's video, or just go to https://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/future to download and install. I’m incredibly interested in your feedback on these four products, especially on the DLINQ designer and the WPF designer, which are two new features we would like to introduce in Orcas. Your feedback on whether they’re easy to use will help us shape what goes into this release.

That said, this is the first time in the Orcas release cycle that we’ve posted this software for your feedback so there are a few rough edges. The big issue I ran into was that the WPF designer (code-named "Cider") needs to be patched on VB Express and VC# Express. We're working on getting the patch up on the web site and I expect it to be available RSN (really soon now). This patch just inserts a couple of registry keys that we found were missing very late in the ship cycle.

So please download and check them out. If you have problems try the MSDN forums. If you want to submit a bug or a suggestion, try the MSDN feedback center.