ORCAS - Next Version Of Visual Studio

Microsoft has recently released "ORCAS", which is the code name for next version of Visual Studio.NET 2005. It is scheduled to be released later this year. It comes with the following new versions:

I didn't see any major changes taking place in ASP.NET  (ASP.NET 2.0 has added a lot new to ASP.NET 1.1) except support for AJAX and a few new controls. Well, the designers have got better.

For example, we got better support for CSS and the most important of all is Intellisense support for Java Script. This move must make writing  JavaScript code easy.

AJAX support comes with ASP.NET now. No need to download anything separately. You can even find ASP.NET Ajax form as one of the options in  Add New Item dialog. This form comes with ScriptManager etc. ready-made.

However, the most important of all is LINQ - Language Integrated Query. 

LINQ to Objects , LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML are three different options providing query facility for objects, relational tables and XML documents respectively.

LINQ to SQL is about object-relational mapping.  It resembles  Java persistence API (or if you like Hibernate/Top Link).  You do create a class that represents a table in the database (much like an Entity in JPA).

As usual Microsoft makes life easy. All new features are easy to use. However, I must confess LINQ uses a lot of new features of C# & VB languages like  type inference - data type of a variable is taken from value given on the right in assignment , anonymous types, extension methods, lambda expressions, object initializers etc. If you dig deep, you have a lot of new syntaxes. At the same time, you can do a lot without getting into all the details.

For example, the following code is used to real all the persons where email address contains yahoo.com by sorting the details by full name of the person. It returns objects of Person class. 

' get access to database
Dim db As New MyDatabase()

 Dim persons = From p In db.persons _
                Where p.email Like "%yahoo.com%" _
                Order By p.fullname _
                Select p

 ' bind data to gridview
 GridView1.DataSource = persons
 GridView1.DataBind()
You can download express editions (as usual 3 - Visual Basic , Visual C# and Visual Web Developer) from msdn.microsoft.com. Each download is about 900 MB and you have to download an image (.img) file.

I could install they easily and they caused no problem till now (who knows the future!).

After downloading .img file, you have to burn it on to DVD using any software that supports .img file. I have used  BURNCDCC tool, which is easy to download and use. You can download it from www.terabyteunlimited.com.

Enjoy new technology like LINQ and language features such as type inference etc. from Microsoft.

Have anything to say about this blog, please provide your opinion using Feedback Form .

Srikanth.