February/March Orcas CTP Now Available

The February CTP (aka as the March CTP) is now available for download as a regular install and as a virtual PC. Here is a video that serves as an introduction to the CTP.

• FebCtp Video: Stream it
• FebCtp Video: Download Video
• Text overview from the install page.
• Please check out the samples Update page, as some of the samples that shipped with the CTP had issues. Get the latest updates, and watch the samples video.

This CTP is a pre-release version of Visual Studio Orcas. This release features support for LINQ to SQL, which means you can use LINQ to query relational databases.

There were a few issues with this CTP when running on Vista, and when running side by side with Visual Studio 2005. As a result, if you have VS 2005 installed, or if you are running on Vista, then I would suggest using the VPC version of this download. When downloading the VPC version of Orcas, don't forget to get the base image.

Here is a link to various LINQ related articles and posts, and be sure also to see this post which details many of the changes since the May CTP. Here is a link to videos and articles that I have written on LINQ.

Here are some Anders videos from Tech Ed Barcelona:

1. LINQ Overview
2. C# 3.0

Here are few other LINQ related videos to help you get started:

1. Anders on LINQ and Functional Programming
2. Anders on Ask the Experts, Jan 17, 2007
3. Anders on LINQ from 2005
4. Anders on LINQ from the LANG.NET Conference
5. Anders Chatting about LINQ and ADO.NET
6. Anders, Herb Sutter, Erik Meijer, Brian Beckman on Software Composability
7. Anders with Chris McConnell
8. Eric Lippert on Type Inference
9. Peter Hallam on Automatic Properties
10. Performance Issues in Visual Studio (Anson Horton, C# PM, only tangentially related to LINQ)
11. Luca Bolognese (Lead PM, C# Team) on "What's New in the May LINQ Preview"
12. C# PM's Karen Liu and DJ Park on the C# IDE, LAF, and support for LINQ.
13. An Interview with Wes Dyer (Download)
14. Raj Pai, C# GPM, on the C# Team

Here are some specs to review:

1. Formatting Code in Orcas
2. DLINQ Data Types and Functions
3. Mapping Draft Specification

http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive/2007/03/01/february-ctp-now-available.aspx