Last week the Orcas Beta 1 was made available for download by Microsoft. It is madeup of 8 large RAR files and can be downlaoded from here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700831.aspx
Some of my excitement was tempered a bit when a bug was found that caused problems with the EDM Wizard. The team was quick to respond and they have already released a patch for it, as posted on their web site:
<FONT size=3>Late last week, after bits had been finalized, we found a bug in the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Wizard that shipped with Visual Studio “Orcas” beta 1. The problem has now been corrected.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
<FONT size=3> <FONT size=3>Please download and install the patch available at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f69e9eb8-0ebd-4fba-a4cc-2050297ba75b&displaylang=en <FONT size=3>to fix the problem.
I have been busy editing my slides for VSLive Orlando where I am doing a full day workshop on data access. Only 1.5 hours of which is focussed on Orcas ... but I still had to review all of the beta 1 tools to make sure my samples still work for May 10th's workshop. So far everything seems fine, but I am glad the patch came out so I can fully test the walk throughs, too. That is the fun of presenting beta topics (or pre-beta topics). :)