Microsoft News Tracker

The crew in Mountain View apparently has time (and certainly money) to spare as evidenced by yesterday’s quiet announcement that Google had acquired Marratech, a Swedish video conferencing provider. They now join Cisco, who just acquired WebEx, and Microsoft, who has Office Live Meeting acquired with PlaceWare, in the scramble for the “unified communications” dollars.

Microsoft Developer Division corporate VP S. Soma Somasegar breaks the Orcas news:

Today we signed off on the Beta 1 release for Visual Studio “Orcas” and .NET FX 3.5.

I am very proud of what my team has accomplished and want to take this opportunity to thank them for the great work they have done – in terms of innovation, new scenarios that we are enabling through a set of rich features and a high focus on quality through the project. Between support for the latest platforms including Windows Vista, Office 2007, Longhorn Server and the Web, significant improvements in developer productivity and taking the next step forward in our Application Lifecycle Tools journey with VSTS and TFS, I know we have got an awesome product in the making.

The VS Pro and VSTS products are at Beta1. As part of this we are also putting out CTPs (Community Technology Previews) of the Express SKUs as this is the first time that we are making Express products for “Orcas” available to our customers.

Folks with a hankering for testing can find information on how to get the beta/CTP Orcas bits here and they are conveniently offering virtual PC images. There’s also a new whitepaper providing an Orcas feature overview while Computerworld NZ has a a useful interview with Prashant Sridharan, Microsoft’s product manager for Visual Studio, covering the product roadmap. No specific date for Orcas had been announced, but it seems to be on the cusp of year end 2007.