Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft Corporate VP S. “Soma” Somasegar has the news at his weblog:

Today, I’m pleased to announce the availability of the beta of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1.

Based on your feedback, Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 addresses issues that were found through a combination of customer reports, MSDN Product Feedback Center and internal testing. I know that this Service Pack is a little late in coming. While I regret that it took longer, we wanted to be as thorough as possible about taking your feedback and decided to take the extra time. You can find a technical description of some of the fixes included in this service pack and download the beta by registering on the Microsoft Connect Site. We’ll have the complete list of fixes posted when the service pack releases. Pending feedback from you on this beta, our plan is to ship the final version in the next 3-4 months.

Also of interest was what was revealed about tool support on Vista. Hit the link for all the details but the net is:

• Visual Studio 2005 SP1 will work on Vista but may have some compatibility issues
• SP1 won’t be delayed to fix any Vista issues – any needed Vista fixes will come later
• .NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0 applications will be supported on Vista (which comes with .NET 3.0)
• Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003 will not be supported on Vista although you can still develop Vista applications using them on Windows XP
• Last but not least: the Visual Basic 6 runtime and IDE will be supported on Vista and that support is on track.

I’d laugh about the last item except that whenever I need to whip up a quick client (as opposed to Web) application, I invariably reach for VB6.

Amanda Silver at the Visual Basic Team Blog:

I’m very excited to announce that the next tech preview of Visual Basic 9.0 which includes support for Language INtegrated Query (codename LINQ) and XML integration atop the XLinq API is now available on the VB Future and the LINQ project websites. This is the result of a ton of hard work for a significant portion of the team and we’re very happy to get it out to you.

This is an additive release to that which came out in the PDC timeframe. It expands the XML integration in both the language and IDE, provides some editor features for the LINQ syntax, and enables DLinq for VB.

I’ve mention LINQ previously here and here. It’s “a unified programming model that extends the .NET Framework to offer integrated querying for objects, databases and XML.”