Visual Studio Release Date

[Stretch]

Do any of you know when the next version of visual studio will be released. I'm currently using 2003 and I'm thinking about upgrading but I don't want to if there's going to a newer version just round the corner. As far as I can tell there is one in development but it has no specific release date yet.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Stretch]

.NET 3.0 doesn't really deserve that version moniker. It's more like 2.5. It's just the 2.0 CLR with some new managed namespaces (namely WPF, WCF, CardSpace etc).

Orcas (the next Visual Studio release) is still some time away (probably '07 Q4) but it will include all the IDE components for making use of the new namespaces in .NET 3.0 - most particularly WPF. They are doing a lot of work to the VS designer to support WPF, as well as Windows Forms.

Orcas will coincide with the next CLR release (which one Redmond blogger recently hinted could be called .NET 3.5) of course because Orcas will also include enhancements to properly support LINQ - arguably the best new feature in the next CLR.

It's quite wierd because when VS 2005 first came out I found it to be quite buggy (the occasional unhandled exception, usually thrown by the designer). But those niggly bugs I encountered early after the RTM seem to have disappeared Did Microsoft sneak out some silent hot fix they didn't tell anyone about? Maybe in a .NET security update?

Thanks NathanE, that's cleared up a few issues. So you think there won’t be a newer version than 2005 for at leased a year and version 3.0 of the framework is full compatible with VS 2005?