Orcas February 2007 CTP Delayed to March

Echoing my earlier "Orcas December 2006 CTP Delayed to January" post, Microsoft's Dinesh Kulkarni announced today that the Orcas February 2007 CTP, which was to fill the missing LINQ to SQL (formerly DLinq) gap, will be delayed to March.

In his February 2, 2007 "Orcas Jan CTP does not have the May 2006 LINQ CTP functionality, March CTP should!" post, Dinesh says:

The Orcas Jan CTP is an interim build which does not contain all the May 2006 LINQ CTP features. Those features are planned for the Orcas March 2007 CTP.

For those who are curious about the process, here is how it works:

- Each feature, whether shown before in a preview like LINQ preview or not, has to pass a bunch of quality gates. This is an interesting but intense process that takes a while.

- As each feature passes the quality gates, it makes its way to a common branch which eventually builds the entire product with several dozen components.

- Orcas CTPs are like trains with schedules. When a feature is "done", it gets to board the next train (e.g. January or March).

It seems to me that we LINQ and ADO.NET 3.0 early adopters need a new Il Duce to make the Orcas trains run on time.

Ciao,

--rj

P.S. Maybe the extra time will result in a better virtual machine installation experience on Virtual Server 2005 R2.

Technorati tags: Orcas, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to DataSets, LINQ to Objects, LINQ to Entities, Entity Framework, Entity Data Model, Entity SQL, eSQL, ADO.NET 3.0