I have been all week working in Sacramento thinking the being away from home should provide me a possibility to catch up on my email and my blog as well as read other technical blogs. However working until late at night and getting up early cuts your free time short.  Business traveling is so depressing, spend hours in airplanes and airports as well those cold hotel rooms, instead of home. I did not mind to travel for work when I was in my 20's, but now having young kids is hard. Being away 5 days at the time makes weekends more enjoyable ;-)

Anyway, the first thing I know about Orcas, is not coming out on 2007, by the new name that's the first thing you learn as well. This is a great disappointment as many software engineers like me need to more into a much better web applications to compete. Visual Studio 2008 was the answer to bring all that inside one IDE. JavaScript intellisense, SilverLight,  and new libraries can change the projects timelines quite a bit.

Something that I'm looking forward is to be able to use the same IDE and work with frameworks 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 without having to fire up or purchase a new Visual Studio.

I have been testing the beta version, thanks to Microsoft for sending it and the early builds. Takes a big part of the hard disk, I do not know if the release version will be that big huge. So far I find the IDE very stable, visually really easy in the eyes as previous version with sharper icons. When you spend 8 hours a day using that program, is nice not to get tired of the look and feel and also I like the editor did not change that much since VS2002. You don't want to learn a new IDE every time the framework version increases.

Did I talk about the Javascript intellisense? Finally Microsoft comes out with that feature that if my memory does not fail me, was asked without any success since VS 2002 or 2003. We still spend a long time writing JavaScript and more important, debugging it. Anybody wants to guess how many hours of our time is this feature going to save? Thanks so much Microsoft for this one, better late than never.

This is the first post of hopefully many other post as I keep testing it. This is a very enjoyable task really, and Microsoft was really help you allowing me to get my hands into the newest builds. The installation was really long, so I don't think I'll be installing every time there is a new version available, but I'll try to keep up as much as I can and I got enough time after the kids go to bed.

Of course if you want to learn more you can subscribe with Scott Guthrie's blog, he is always releasing great Orcas FAQs and reviews. As well you can see other reviews from Microsoft MVPs at http://weblogs.asp.net about this very welcomed product.

Cheers

Al