March 2007 Orcas CTP, now with cool VB features!

Maybe you’ve seen this elsewhere, but the big news of the week (VB-wise, at least) is that the March 2007 Orcas CTP is now out. Those of you who’ve been following along with the previous Orcas CTPs will have noticed the paucity of new VB features relative to some of the other VS languages. This has been largely due to the different implementation strategies of the languages–since the Visual Basic compiler is so closely tied to the IDE services, we needed to really plumb the features all the way through before we could consider them “complete.” Anyway, many of these features are now on-line and available to be tried out. They include a bunch of features we’ve discussed before:

  • Query expressions
  • Object initializers
  • Extension methods
  • Type inference
  • Anonymous types
  • XML literals
  • XML access members

And the CTP also includes some pretty nice Intellisense enhancements that have not been discussed previously. I encourage everyone to give the CTP a whirl and let us know what you think!

6 thoughts on “March 2007 Orcas CTP, now with cool VB features!

  1. Pingback: OPC Diary

  2. paulvick

    Fan: Dynamic identifiers ended up not fitting in the Orcas schedule, so they were cut, unfortunately. We hope to be able to do them in a future release!

    Bryan: XML literals is the ability to put XML directly into source, like ("Dim x = <foo>x</foo>").

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