Now that Orcas Beta1 is on your machines, we’re trying to finish up the Beta2 version of Orcas to deliver those features you are so eagerly awaiting – features like Group By, explicit Joins, Nullable, keyword Intellisense, and Lambda Expressions. Things are looking very good as you probably witnessed in Kit’s web cast just the other day.

In other news, the MIX developer conference starts on Monday in Las Vegas. I wanted to make sure that our VB web developers out there know which sessions to attend to get the best picture of what’s coming down the road. Obviously, the most revolutionary for VB developers will be the keynote with Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie – this will make VB developers of all sorts get pretty giddy. What’s coming is awesome and I promise to have another blog entry on Monday to make sure that those who can’t attend are well informed.

Aside from the keynote, be sure not to miss:

–          Jim Hugunin and John Lam talking about dynamic languages on .NET. (11:45am, Tuesday) This one has so much revolutionary stuff in it that they actually pulled it from the session descriptions on the Mix site. Long story short, search the web on musings about why John and Jim are at Microsoft, add to that the fact that the VB team has been working with them heavily, and you might be able to figure it out.  

–          Developing Data Driven Applications Using the New Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET

Very, very cool new controls for ASP.NET that are particularly attractive to people that appreciate every opportunity to write less code.

–          Rapidly Building Data Driven Web Pages with Dynamic ADO.NET

Sam and Shyam will talk about a new LINQ-enabled API for data access that’s very productive and again, will be appreciated by folks that don’t like to have to type so many characters or use designers to generate a simple forms-over-data app.

–          Using LINQ to Dramatically Improve Data Driven Development in Web Applications

Anders will be giving the LINQ overview but this time it will be specifically targeted at using LINQ to author web applications. Be sure not to miss Anders typing the “Dim” keyword!

Once the sessions have been delivered, I’ll make sure you’ve got the scoop on what the heck these guys are talking about.