Microsoft Corp."s professional Developers Conference is expected to be a coming-out party of sorts for the next version of Visual Studio, code-named Orcas. Primary among Visual Studio"s new features and new direction will be advances in how the tool set handles data, sources said. Data becomes "cool" in Orcas, said a source familiar with Microsoft"s strategy for the forthcoming release.
Indeed, Anders Hejlsberg, Microsoft distinguished engineer and father of the C# language at the Redmond, Wash., company, will be delivering talks at next week"s PDC conference in Los Angeles on just how this will work.
Hejlsberg is scheduled to talk about the .Net Language Integrated Query Framework. An abstract of the talk stated, "The future "Orcas" release of Visual Studio aims to unify the programming models through integrated query capabilities in C# and Visual Basic, a strongly typed data access framework, and an innovative API for manipulating and querying XML."