According to this announcement on Somasegar's Weblog, the next version of the World's Best Development tool (a personal opinion) is still on schedule to ship by the end of this month. This is good news for us .Net developer geeks, especially those of us that have already been using the Orcas Visual Studio 2008 betas and CTP releases for quite a while now, and have been somewhat concerned over the prolonged drought of CTP or RC previews since the July Beta 2 release. Truth be told, I had actually been anticipating some news that the VS 2008 release was in danger of slipping due to the relative silence of the Orcas dev team over the summer. So this announcement comes as welcome relief and it appears the VS folks have simply been heads down trying to get the product shipped on time as advertised.
But something else happened this morning that was completely unexpected. That would be the almost immediate and personal response I received from "Soma" when I voiced my concerns over the lack of interim releases since beta 2, and possible breaking changes, in the comments section on his blog. It is very cool to know that even Microsoft Corporate VP's can and will make the time to respond directly to their customers. Good job VS team. I can't wait to get my grubby little hands on those "gold bits" later this month.