VS "Orcas" and CF 3.5 beta 1

Although it has been available for download for sometime and posted on other sites/forums, I thought I'd post the link here.

The download is a Microsoft Virtual PC image, so you'll need Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 + SP1 to use it.

Some of the new interesting features are as follows:

1. System.IO.Compression support (this has got to make things easier)
2. LINQ subset
3. WCF subset

Daniel Moth talked about LINQ at the recent MSDN roadshow in London. The talk wasn't specific to devices but for the desktop but the same syntax and functionality is supported in the coming releases of the CF. All I can say is, watch out for LINQ!

LINQ will be available in the .NET Framework 3.5 and onwards. It is actually a language enhancement, so will be available in C# 3.0 and VB 9.0. But just to be clear, in order to use LINQ, you need version 3.5 of the .NET Framework - which is based on v2.0 of the CLR.

Once I have had a play with the WCF features with regards to the CF, I will blog about my experiences here.