February CTP of Visual Studio "Orcas" / .NET 3.5 is out

The Community Technology Preview of the next version of the .NET components that the XML team ships is ready for download.  It is available in two forms: a self-extracting installer that will setup a version of Visual Studio that can co-exist side by side with VS 2005, and a Virtual PC image.

The new stuff includes:

• XML Tools: XSLT Debugger
  • Enables Input Data Breakpoints allowing the user to break the execution of the style-sheet whenever a certain node in input document is hit.

• XML Editor Performance Improvements
  • Performance in the Xml Editor for Intellisense, schema validation etc is improved by implementing incremental parsing of the XML Document.

• Seamless transition between XML Editor and XSD Designer
• Improves the experience a user has when working with an XML Schema in textual and graphical mode at the same time.

• LINQ to XML
• System.Xml Bridge Classes added – There is a set of extension methods allowing XPath / XSLT to be used over LINQ to XML trees, allow XSLT transformations to produce an LINQ to XML tree, and to validate an XElement tree against an XML Schema.
• Event Model - This allows LINQ to XML trees to be efficiently synchronized with a GUI, e.g. a Windows Presentation Foundation application
• Class hierarchy changes - XObject class added, XStreamingElement class (temporarily) removed
• Various understandability / usability improvements – There have been a number of relatively minor changes done in response to internal reviews, usability studies, and external feedback to make the API more clean and consistent.

We've already given an overview of the XML features and some details on the XML support in Visual Basic 9.  Now that the lastest tools and APIs are available for you to experiment with, we'll be posting more frequently with details and examples.

If you have questions, feel free to post them publicly to the comments thread here, privately via our contact form,  or to the LINQ Project Forum.