I've spent most of my free Orcas experimentation time on Linq so far, and the occasional foray into the wild world of WPF. I really want to get to grips with WPF in the next few months. It's not going to be easy stuff, that's for sure, but hopefully the results - graphically at least - will be worth the effort.
Saving Project Files
I've noticed a few changes in the Orcas/2008 IDE. It seems that we've gone full circle again on project file saving. In Orcas, your new project is automatically saved to the hard drive - whereas in VB 2005 you have that kind of temporary system where you don't get asked to decide to save to a path of your choice until the first time you hit the save button or save menu item. Having got used to the 2005 way, I've actually come to prefer it . It can be a bit dispiriting to see just how many projects you can happily discard as worthless, but it doesn't half cut down on the search task when you want to go back later and find a worthwhile project in that huge mass of low grade Solution goo.
Intellisense
Intellisense has just come of age! Orcas Intellisense is just absolutely excellent. Not just in the Linq queries, where it is of course particularly useful in keeping your head straight on what you're trying to achieve either. For standard code bashing jobs, Intellisense has been refined.
First off, you only get a dropdown list of possible selections that begin with the letter(s) you have typed so far. The list gets further and further filtered as you type. In 2005 there is some filtering, but it's simply not as slick as this.
But the thing I like the best about it is that it remembers what your last choice was for any selection. So to take an example, the first time you start to type:
Console.W
you will get all Console methods beginning with W, as you would expect. Let's assume that you select Console.WriteLine.
You then go off and use Intellisense for other code insertion, using different initial letters. When you next select "Console.W" you are offered your last recorded choice - specifically in this case "Console.WriteLine" which happens to be way down the list of W choices. I don't have VS 2005 on the machine I'm writing this on, but as far as I remember, in 2005 you are offered the first match that begins with your current letter, not the one you last used. I've found this to be really useful.