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)

S. Somasegar, Microsoft Corporate VP of the Developer Division, has announced that Beta 1 of the Professional version of Orcas, the next version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team System and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, is ready for download.

This beta version also includes the .Net Framework release 3.5 and a first CTP pre-beta build of the Express version of Orcas for non-professional programmers and hobbyists. At this Channel 9 video, Somasegar talks more in depth about this new version and about the next release of Visual Studio Team System Tools post Orcas codenamed “Rosario”.

Orcas Beta 1 is available as installation media ISO images or as VPC images with the software pre-installed. In addition, you can download prerelease versions of Visual Basic Express, Visual C++ Express, Visual C# Express, and Visual Web Developer.

As Mary Jo Foley points out, “Microsoft execs said earlier this week to expect a Beta 2 of Orcas later this year. The final version of Orcas may be released to manufacturing by the end of calendar 2007, but could slip into 2008, they said.”

VMWare Workstation Version 6 will include a new feature that simplifies the process of debugging applications running on a virtual machine instance from Eclipse and Visual Studio.

Integrated Virtual Debugger

With the new Workstation IDE (integrated development environment) plug‐ins, software developers are provided with a configurable interface between their virtual machines and Visual Studio (Windows only) or Eclipse (Windows or Linux) that lets them easily test, run, and debug programs in virtual machines.

You can specify settings such as the location of the virtual machine, which setup or clean‐up scripts to execute, the location of shared folders, and (in Visual Studio) directories to be copied between the host and guest.

When configured, the integrated virtual debugger finds the virtual machine, powers it on if necessary, sets up the environment based on your configuration settings, and launches or attaches to the application. All breakpoints, watch points, and so on that you set in your IDE will function as if you were running your application on the host computer.

Depending on the configuration setting you specify, when the application finishes running, the virtual machine is powered off, suspended, reverted to a snapshot, or left in its current state.

You can try now this new feature downloading the just released beta version at the VMware Workstation 6 Beta Program.

Tony, the developer of the Eclipse plugin, explains some of the project details in his post Making remote debugging easier to use, so drop him a comment if you like this new feature.

(Via EclipseZone)