Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
A new significant addition to the .Net Services CTP is an the introduction of long-lived, system-inherent messaging primitives that exist and operate completely independent of any active listener that sits somewhere on a machine plugged into the Service Bus.
Shortly after it was released, the F# September 2008 CTP has been updated. This is a minor update, which is supposed to address some issues left open in the CTP released a week ago. "Support for units of measure on decimal types was limited in the first CTP release, and this has now been addressed", according to Don Syme, a researcher on the F# team.
Microsoft has released the next CTP of Visual Studio as a Virtual PC image. Is this a new trend or a one-off experiment?
On Sept 7, Microsoft released the "Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name 'Orcas' Community Technology Preview â Development Tools for .NET Framework 3.0". These tools are designed to add Visual Studio support for developers working on.NET Framework 3.0. The release has nothing to do with LINQ.
Last week Microsoft released another community tech preview for Sandcastle. Sandcastle is the tool Microsoft currently uses to produce the API documentation for Visual Studio 2005. Anand Raman of the Sandcastle team claims that they can compile the documentation for the entire framework API in about 30 minutes.
Microsoft has released the 5th CTP of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, Microsoft's new database development product designed for managing all database change. Team Data for short, or "DataDude", is the first Microsoft tool to provide automatic support for database unit testing, generating test data, and refactoring.
Microsoft has released a new Community Tech Preview (CTP) of Atlas, Microsoft's AJAX framework for ASP.NET. Note that Atlas can also be used with other web technoloogies such as PHP or ColdFusion via the Atlas client-script libraries.
The June CTP of the .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly, WinFX) is now available for download. This is an update since the Beta 2 release, and is intended for use with Windows Vista build 5456. Note that there is no Go-Live license available for this release.
