The newest Customer Technology Preview (CTP) of the next version (code name Orcas) of the Visual Studio is publicly available as of Monday, October 30! You can download it from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C09B5A2D-EB6A-44B6-8BBD-3764A2FDA9CE&displaylang=en

It is available as an Virtual PC image split to 7 separate downloads. You can run it using either Virtual PC or Virtual Server of which both are available as free downloads for some time now. There was also base Virtual PC image of the operating system.

What's new? A lot, and you can read it all here. I would like to highlight just a few interesting features:

  • ADO.NET 3.0 Advancements - support for LINQ
  • LINQ over XML (XLinq)
  • Multi-targeting  (.NET Framework 1.1, 2.0, etc.)
  • A high performance trace listener which logs XML to disk in the event schema - great news for everybody that wants to understand how an application behaves. Just log what you need and let the performance be with you.
  • Security Platform Parity - Suite B support: AES
  • New IO types that expose almost all pipe functionality provided by Windows - pipes are good for plumbing... your application.
  • A new high performance set collection - do not implement set-alike algorithms using Array or List types. Clarity is very important and you should use sets!

Please give it a try! Download here.