• Improve Developer Productivity
• Manage the Application Life Cycle
• Employ the Latest Technologies

After all, true geeks are more interested in the latest technologies than in process, right? Of interest to me in the Orcas release of Visual Studio, I see:

LINQ (pp. 8,13)

I admit I’m a bit of a Luddite when it comes to language features. It took me a while to see that C#’s “using” syntax was clearly a good thing. What do you expect from a C++ developer whose first C++ compiler was a cfront translator–we didn’t have C++ compilers back then. Don’t give me syntactic sugar–let me do it the hard way! Give me a preprocessor!

All the same, LINQ seems to be a boon to anyone who wants to query over structured data. I’ll likely adopt it in (personal) record time.

Further support for building WPF applications (pp. 5, 19)

Debugging support for WPF. I have to wonder what that will look like. Will I be able to step through XAML?

New APIs in Window Vista (p. 6)

Seriously, are there really “more than 8,000 new native APIs available in Windows Vista?” My brain hurts. Maybe I need to buy a llama farm and learn to live the simple life. I mean, I started programming Windows code in 1991. That’s later than many, earlier than most. Dear God, I even digested Kraig Brockschmidt’s book, Inside OLE2! Gah! Is my brain going to fill up and return E_OUTOFMEMORY? And will that be a fatal error?!

New managed add-in model (pp. 14, 16)

I’ve seen some tough questions asked about how to control the impact of rogue add-ins in a managed application. The CLR Add-In Team Blog indicates someone at Microsoft is working at addressing these issues, as does this white paper.

Lightweight reader/writer lock with deadlock-free upgrade support (p. 14)

Hmm, a slimmed-down read-writer lock that doesn’t support recursion. This sounds a bit like what Jeffrey Richter describes in CLR via C# (second edition, pages 642-643). I can’t wait to compare Richter’s version in Wintellect’s Power Threading library with what Reflector tells me about Orcas’ System.Threading.ReaderWriterLockSlim. It should be an educational experience.

New IO types that expose almost all pipe functionality provided by Windows (p. 15)

It’s about time.

A trace listener for ETW (p. 16)

Woot! High-perf event tracing!

Peer Networking Classes (p. 17)

I don’t know how much of the P2P APIs this might encompass, but it’s definitely an area I’ll be experimenting with. I expect we’ll be seeing some very cool apps born out of this space. Apps we haven’t thought of yet.

Woof. As usual my eyes are bigger than my stomach. I hope to have time to explore at least a few of these areas.