Microsoft Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1

It looks like developers are going to have to wait a tad longer for the final version of Orcas to ship from Microsoft. Orcas is the code-name used to refer to the upcoming edition of Microsoft Visual Studio, initially planned to ship in 2007/2008. At the beginning of this year, Scott Guthrie, the general manager of Microsoft's Developer Division confirmed 2007 as the year the final version of Orcas would be made available to the public.

But in the meantime, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft announced the release of the Beta 1 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," Somasegar revealed.

According to data from Microsoft, the various Community technology previews or Visual Studio Orcas has amassed in excess of 300,000 downloads. While the Redmond Company has interpreted this as a positive sign it has failed to this point to provide the release date of the final version of Orcas.

"Orcas Beta 1 bits for the various different product SKUs will be available at the MSDN Visual Studio Futures site over the next day or so. The team and I are looking forward to hearing your feedback on Beta 1," Somasegar concluded.