Visual Studio "Orcas" March CTP is available now

Today we released the March CTP of Visual Studio codename ”Orcas”.

Our goal with Orcas is to build the best tool set for Windows Vista and Office 2007, expand our role-based and team offerings, deliver complete AJAX support and deliver revolutionary language and data integration.

In this CTP, you can start to see the great progress we’ve made here. For the first time, we have a WPF designer in the product, enabling a more complete WPF development experience. One of the key promises of Orcas is language-data integration and you can see this with the Language Integrated Query capability built into the product. Team Foundation Server users will see the first CTP of the Orcas release with a number of customer requested features. There’s all of this and a lot more built into this CTP.

To get this CTP you can go here and download either a VPC image (be sure to get the base image disk if this is your first time) or a self-extracting install set. For more information you can visit the MSDN Developer Centers, where you will find links to the team blogs and our MSDN forums. You can also submit feedback on the CTP through Microsoft Connect

This release is one of our key milestones on the way to the Beta 1 and will really allow you to receive a true experience of what Orcas will provide. I encourage you to download the CTP and provide us with your feedback. Your early and ongoing feedback is absolutely a key part of us building the right product.

Namaste!