Playing with Orcas

So at work I was asked to participate in our Visual Studio “Orcas” technology adopter program…Of course I said “yes” even though I thought the chances were slight that I’d be able to actually use it in anger on a project.

But what do you know? The TAP program hasn’t even really kicked off yet, and I’ve been using Orcas beta 1 for real for a couple of weeks now already, thanks in part to the multi-targetting (so I can use it in place of VS 2005 for .net 2 and 3) and the fact that it’s compatible with TFS 2005.

 I’ve been using it from inside a Windows Vista virtual machine which I’ve dedicated 1GB of RAM for.  My thoughts so far? Well, I’m planning to blog on a bunch of Orcas features as I use them, and form concrete opinions on them, but generally I’ve been impressed. The big thing is that it’s rock solid. Compared to some other product beta’s that I’ve used, Orcas Beta 1 is as steady as a finished product. Granted I’ve not really been going hard out to break it or anything, but compared to experiences with VS2005 betas, and betas of Vista and Office 2007, where even the beta 2 and RC releases were buggy in some cases, this has been a dream to use. 

 So, overall I’d have to say I’m impressed so far, to the point where I’ve come up with a few ideas of some little side projects to tinker with using Orcas. I’ll blog on some of those as I go too, hopefully.