Thanks to my VBCity colleague, Scott Waletzko a.k.a. Sp!ke, I'm now happily sat here with the Orcas Beta 1 fully installed and running smoothly. I'd suffered more than my fair share of pain when installing the March 2007 CTP so I was a bit concerned that the Beta would be a re-run of that. The VPC version had been a particular nightmare but I did get a more or less working version up and running eventually. After that, apart from a couple of minor glitches - all efforts to view the Property pages gave me an error and I didn't have access to the offline MSDN - it has worked well and I've been able to do quite a lot of research in general and testing out various elements of LINQ in particular.
I've also made a tentative start on XAML and WPF, but can see right away that it's going to be a tough uphill slog. I reckon the learning curve of WPF is going to be just as steep as the one from Classic VB to VB.NET. Ah well, no pain, no gain, as they say.
I really hope there are some VB authors out there who are already planning to write WPF books using VB as the code behind. Almost every book I can find at the moment only has C# as the code behind language. It's hard enough getting your head round the XAML without having to translate fron C# to VB on the fly too. Luckily there are some useful examples using VB in the MSDN pages, so I'm working through those while waiting for the first VB oriented book to appear on the bookstalls. (If anyone knows of any, whether available now or planned, please post up details as a comment.)
Having spent several days (I exaggerate not) sweating over the March CTP installation, I was in a bit of trepidation about what kind of experience the Beta 1 installation would give me. I needn't have worried. I carefully uninstalled all previous Orcas and related installations, keeping strictly to the uninstall order in the ReadMe. It took a while and a couple of reboots. Then, fingers crossed, I started the install of Beta 1. Smooth as silk! I went for the default installation option and all went well. MSDN installation next and this too was totally problem/warning message/blue screen free!
So, after maybe a total of 3 - 4 hours, it's all running well. I also got hold of the Beta 1 LINQ samples, which are of course very similar to the March CTP ones. Setting up LINQ to SQL having given me a problem in the CTP stage, so I was pleased to see that the comments and instructions in the latest LINQ Samples download made more sense (at least to me!) and I was able to get them running this time.
The download version I used came from here The Pro Edition Self-Extracting Install. I'm told that it runs almost without problem side by side with VS 2005, but I'm still playing safe and keeping it in quarantine on a spare machine. All the VB 2005 projects that I have tried running inside Orcas have run without problem (as they should of course, because Orcas boasts multi-targetting of Framework versions 2, 3 and 3.5).
The Beta 1 LINQ samples for VB can be downloaded from here. Speaking of LINQ, I'm hoping to get the third part of my LINQ To Objects article finished by the weekend, before moving on to exploring other areas of LINQ .