Visual Studio Orcas January 2007 CTP

The new pre-release of Visual Studio "Orcas" is now available!

Here is what concerns LINQ in this CTP:

• ADO.NET is fully integrated with LINQ and offers many options for using LINQ in various scenarios: LINQ to SQL provides direct access to database tables from the programming environment, LINQ to Entities enables developers to use LINQ over EDM models, and LINQ to DataSet allows the full expressivity of LINQ to be used over DataSets.
• C# 3.0 Language Support. This CTP implements all of the C#3.0 language features from the May LINQ CTP including:
• Query Expressions
• Object and Collection Initializers
• Extension Methods
• Local Variable Type Inference and Anonymous Types
• Lambdas bound to Delegates and Expression trees
  

• LINQ to Objects. The LINQ to Objects API supports queries over any .NET collection, such as arrays and Generic Lists. This API is defined in the System.Linq namespaces inside System.Core.dll.
• LINQ over XML (XLinq)
• Enable further LINQ over XML feature support (in addition to the functionality available in the Oct 2006 CTP) such as the ability to apply XLST to transform into and out of XLinq trees, support for System.XML reader/writer interfaces for improved XML sharing with DOM applications and System.XML schema validation for XLinq nodes.
  

Improved support for LINQ to SQL should be available in the next CTP, which is planned for February.

The January CTP is available as a Virtual PC image or as a self-extracting install.