Scott Guthrie gave a presentation to the Visual Studio User Group (VISUG) in Belgium showcasing one of the most recent VS “Orcas” builds.

I’ve held off linking to it, since there seems to be a problem with the video feed on MSDN which causes it keep crashing IE at inopportune moments. It’s better than it was a few days ago, but still not perfect. If you persevere, though the first half of the presentation is worth listening to (skip to 5:00 to jump the VISUG introductions).

A couple of interesting points I picked up. According to the presentation “Orcas” is still on track for a public beta in “the Spring timeframe” followed by a second public beta in the summer, with release in the second half of the year. We’ve been hearing that for a while but it’s good to know that the first beta still looks to be on track.*

The other point I wanted to pick out is an unusual one. Most “Orcas” posts focus on LINQ, WPF integration or ASP.NET AJAX. I wanted to mention the split frameworks that are available in the new version.

We all know that .NET 2.0 can run alongside .NET 1.1, so you can develop and maintain ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 1.1 webpages using VS 2003 and VS.NET respectively. Well, in “Orcas” the IDE will be able to deal with both frameworks. So you can create both .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5 applications within “Orcas”, making upgrading to the new version a lot easier than it has been before. It looks like this is going to be a standard policy from now on. It’s a small thing compared to LINQ, but I think it’s going to make people’s lives much easier.
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* Of course, since this speech was made the February CTP release moved out into March. I’m not sure whether that’ll affect things?