Orcas December 2006 CTP Delayed to January

A new "Notes on the January CTP" post on Charlie Calvert's (C#) Community Blog this morning (12/22/2006) announced a delay in long-awaited Orcas December 2006 CTP. Here's Charlie's explanation:

The January CTP (formerly known as the December CTP) should be out shortly after the new year. We are sorry about the delay; it is due in part to the huge December 14 storm that knocked out the power for over a million residents here in the Seattle area.

According to Charlie's updated "Community Convergence XV" post, the January 2007 CTP will drop "the first week of January." Note: .NET Framework 3.5 now appears to be the official Orcas version. The new System.Core.dll, System.Xml.Linq.dll and System.Data.Linq.dll files will be located in a \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5.nnnnn\ folder. To prepare developers for the overdue CTP, Charlie has posted (unofficial) pending updates to the May 2006 CTP for:

• Syntax and Reference Changes
• Project File Changes
• Array or Collection Initializers
• Other API Changes

The most significant changes are to replace Imports System.Query with one or more of these Imports directives: System.Linq, System.Xml.Linq, or System.Data.DLinq. Following are links to earlier OakLeaf posts on the former December 2006 CTP:

• Missing LINQs in Orcas December 2006 CTP (12/18/2006)
• Orcas RTM to Slip from 2007 to 2008? (12/9/2006)
• Reduce Object/XML Impedance Mismatch with LINQ to XSD (12/7/2006)
• Orcas December 2006 CTP Coming with New LINQ/EDM Bits (11/25/2006)

Stay tuned for further developments. Technorati Tags: Orcas, ADO.NET vNext, Entity Framework, Entity Data Model, LINQ, LINQ to Entities, LINQ to DataSets, LINQ to SQL, Entity SQL, eSQL, DLinq, XLinq, C# 3.0, VB 9.0