Live From Redmond Coverage: Orcas Overview

Posted by Jonathan Allen on Apr 24, 2007

Sections

Enterprise Architecture,

Development

Topics

Web Services ,

Artifacts & Tools ,

.NET Framework ,

SOA ,

Enterprise Architecture ,

Tools ,

.NET ,

Programming ,

Agile ,

LINQ ,

Architecture ,

SQL Everywhere

In conjunction with the release of VS Orcas Beta 1, the VB Team is hosting a series of live web casts. The first installment, presented by John Stallo, ran today.

Under VS 2005, strongly typed datasets don't work well with web services. Instead of reusing the server-side classes, the client-side uses automatically generated stubs. In Orcas, developers can choose to reuse the real classes rather than generate stubs. This is done by setting a property on the strongly typed classes so that they are generated in a separate library.

A short demo on using LINQ over typed datasets was given. The tooltips for VB are improved over previous versions, with hints that show LINQ coding patterns such as "From Element In Collection [, ...]". Keywords and symbols such as AndAlso and _ have tooltips describing what they do as well. Like C#, keywords are now included in code completion as well.

Extensive support for caching data locally has been added. Local databases are built against SQL Server compact edition and most of code needed to synchronize is handled by designers. John Stallo promised that a later demos will show synchronizing local data caches using both direct database access and via web services.

The next presentation, LinQ Overview, starts on Wednesday at 9 am Pacific time.