Visual Basic Power Pack, CTPs and SPs, Oh my!

Lots of code has been flowing out of Redmond recently:

  • Two Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs have been released. The Microsoft Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 and Microsoft PrintForm Component 1.0 are both targeted at people who use COM and VB6 and should make migration of code easier in many cases. You can get them here, and more are likely to come.
  • Beta 1 of VS 2005 Service Pack 1 has been released. This service pack includes a significant amount of work on the part of the Visual Basic compiler team and addresses a lot of the major issues (performance or otherwise) that we’ve found after release. I encourage people to try it out and report any problems you run into with it (I’ve got it installed!). You can get it on Microsoft Connect.
  • The September Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Orcas has been released. Unlike the previous LINQ CTPs, this CTP is actual Orcas production code instead of a prototype implementation. As a result, many of the features present in the last LINQ CTP aren’t in this CTP, so it’s going to be a step back in that regard. Also, because of the way the CTP schedule and the VB compiler schedule happened to (not) sync up, there are not a lot of new VB features in this CTP. Expect much more in the coming CTPs! You can get the CTP here (and hurrah! We’re finally moving to Virtual PC images!).

Enjoy all the tasty code!

3 thoughts on “Visual Basic Power Pack, CTPs and SPs, Oh my!

  1. Denis

    I Use Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2002 Enterprise Edition And Don’t Know What’S Hapening. Some Years Ago I Just Upgraded To VS 2002 And Now I Have To Upgrade To VS 2005? Is It Necessary To Use CTPs and SPs Presented Here?

    Reply

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