The Jan 2007 CTP of Orcas (the next version of Visual Studio) was released yesterday. Note that there is a VPC download on one page and an installation download on another page. I didn't realize this and grabbed the installation, rather than the VPC, since it looked similar to the VPC download. With my pokey DSL, I didn’t feel like spending another 3+ hours downloading the eight file parts again, so I just let the full installation run in another VPC while I worked on something else.
Note that if you are looking for any new ADO.NET stuff or integration of the tools that could be installed against the August CTP, these are not the bits for you These bits will be relative to what was in the October CTP. So if that's all you are interested in, there's probably no reason to get the new bits.
However, in the MSDN Library, there is plenty of documentation and reference info (yay) that wasn’t there before:
Here is a link to the readme file for the new CTP.
So to review, from Pablo's post after the October bits were released:
Which CTP should you be using?
- For people who just want to get an understanding of how the ADO.NET Entity Framework, LINQ to Entities and LINQ to DataSet the best bet for now is still the August ADO.NET vNext CTP.
- For those who want to see the very latest in the Entity Framework runtime and can live without the tools integration that you get in the August CTP, check out the October 2006 Orcas CTP and download the ADO.NET Samples.
In this case the new Jan 2007 CTP seems to be interchangeable with the October CTP. No integrated tools, but a quick (hardly thorough) test of the ADO.NET Samples referenced above showing off the newer Entity APIs, seemed to work just fine.
In pictures, if you want to do this,
this,
or this
then you want Pablo's first bullet point which in reality ends up being May bits plus August CTP plus the EDM Designer prototype.
You can generate Entity Models in code without the designers. The code snippet in the ADO.NET Orcas Forums from Chris Robinson on the ADO.NET Team will show you how.
I had to work between three VPCs to validate all of this information and get the various screenshots. That was fun. :-)