The Visual Basic team is hosting a series of Live Meeting presentations aimed at the next version of Visual Basic and Visual Studio code named “Orcas”. The presentations are all done by actual team members working on the specific technology, and are a great way to hear from and ask your questions directly to the product team.

  • Tuesday, April 24, 2007: VB9 – Orcas Overview. This web cast will cover the breadth of features that you can expect to see in the upcoming release of Visual Basic. John Stallo will demo how all the features such as LinQ, N-Tier, WCF support, and OCS work together to help you build your applications faster than ever before.

  • Wednesday, April 25, 2007: VB9 – LinQ Overview. This web cast will explore the new LinQ features in Visual Basic. We will show how to take advantage of LinQ to build applications that query and aggregate data from multiple sources, including in-memory objects, databases, and XML.

  • Wednesday, May 02, 2007: VB9 – LINQ to SQL & O/R Designer Deep Dive. This web cast extends the SQL and LinQ web cast by showing you how to use the new OR designer to build applications that take advantage of LinQ to SQL.

  • Wednesday, May 09, 2007: VB9 – Building N-Tier Applications. In this web cast, Young Joo will show you how you can separate business logic from data access logic using the new N-Tier features in Visual Basic.

  • Wednesday, May 16, 2007: VB9 – Offline Data Caching. This web cast demonstrates one of the newest features in Visual Basic. Milind Lele will demonstrate how to use SQL Server Compact Edition to build applications that can cache your data offline and have it automatically sync to your database when you are online.

  • Wednesday, May 23, 2007: VB9 – Deep Dive into LinQ. This web cast will dive into details how the LinQ features work. In the process, we will discuss anonymous types, type inference, inline functions, extension methods, and how these features work together to give you the LinQ experience. In addition, we will demo how these features can be used independently to help you build your applications quicker and with less code.

  • Wednesday, May 30, 2007: VB9 – Building Service-Oriented Applications with WCF. This web cast will show you how you can produce and consume WCF services using the new WCF support with Visual Basic and build applications that take advantage of the next-generation service architecture.

  • Wednesday, June 06, 2007: Using the Interop Toolkit to Migrate your VB6 Applications to .NET. This web cast takes a look at how you can use the Interop Toolkit to migrate your VB 6 applications to the .NET platform, and also discusses strategies you can use to migrate your VB 6 applications to the .NET platform.

  • Wednesday, June 13, 2007: LINQ Best Practices. This web cast will explore best practices for writing easy to read, consumable queries, including naming, usage, and performance ideas.

(Via Beth Massi)