I've been out of serious development for a couple of years (i.e., basically living in VS). As as way to revive my interest in development (which for a few reasons has been waning of late) I decided to re-launch this blog as well as play around with some coding additions to it. As part of this I've gotten my little server unpacked (yes, I have been here 9 months but still :-)) and play with VS again. I started off my spin-up by watching these excellent short videos by Scott Guthrie on the new features in Orcas (or more correctly now, Visual Studio 2008). On a side note we don't get cool code names in Office...just numbers...the one I'm working on now is Office 14.
The training videos are fantastic and seeing how things like the CSS editing functions as well as LINQ has been really great.  So, as you do I decided to have a play with some of this stuff in VS 2008 Beta 2; man life is easier with this new stuff. I love the model LINQ provides to query data using PROPER code...I can imagine some purists just freaking out about the 'auto generation' aspects of LINQ but hey I think of it as being like moving from C++ to C#...what you lost in raw control you more than make up for in productivity!
Anyway just checking in...other things happening...well, I got a hearing aid last week; I had an operation on my left ear a few months ago and I thought I'd try out a hearing aid before going through it again for my right (without it I'm about 60% deaf in my right ear...even after the op I'm about 20% deaf in my left). Also got a great new printer / fax / scanner / phone device which also has wireless...which I love! Oh, and busy writing specs for the next part of Project Server development...but not nearly as busy doing this as I should be :-)