Orcas Beta 2

Microsoft has released beta 2 of Orcas You can download it from here. This release is really coming along in terms of functionality and usability especially the WPF editor.

Visual Studio "Orcas" and .Net 3.5 Beta 1 released

Microsoft has released  You can download it from the Microsoft download site. It can be downloaded as a VPC image of the Team Suite or if you're an MSDN subscriber the Pro version has already been posted.

SQL 2005 SP2 Re-release and post fixes

Bob Ward has posted an article that explains the re-release of SQL 2005 SP2 and the various hotfixes posted later. If your using, deploying or developing solutions for SQL 2005, you'll want to check the article out. You can check it out here.

Workflow starter kit released

Microsoft has released the first starter for Windows Workflow foundation. The starter kit is a web based task oriented workflow example. The starter kit demonstrates predefined roles for creation, approval and monitoring.

Expression Blend and Web are finally added to MSDN

 Microsoft has been sending conflicting and ambiguous messages regarding these products for some time.

 At one point they attempted to make the distinction between designers and developers, but let's face it, I have yet to see a small to mid-sized organization that had that separation. In reality we often wear both hats. So to me it just makes sense to be able to have the right toolset available to accomplish the task at hand.

You can catch all the details at Somasegar's WebLog.

WCF performance Whitepaper

 The Connected frameworks team at Microsoft just released a whitepaper titled A Performance Comparison of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) with Existing Distributed Communication Technologies. It's an interesting read and if you're looking to sell WCF in your organization, this will be a valuable reference.

While your looking at the WCF whitepaper,they previously released a WWF whitepaper, Performance Characteristics of Windows Workflow Foundation, which discusses Workflow performance.

SQL Server 2005 Adoption rate survey

SQLServerCentral just posted a SQL 2005 adoption survey. They surveryed 610 site users and the results are pretty interesting.

In my organization we currently use SQL 2000 for most of our production applications, but that said, we are also migrating toward 2005 with newer applications. Probably single bigest reason I've seen to favor 2005 over 2000 is ETL. I haven't seen alot of adoption for many of the new features such as CLR integration, XML and XQuery and even the Service Broker for that matter. Some that I would venture to guess is a result of developers using tried and true methods.