There's not much I can add to the slides presented by Bradley Millington other than the fact that I was unable to get him to commit to a time frame for Orcas, I did try though :) Also there are some very cool stuff coming for Visual Studio to aid us in developing AJAX enabled web applications such as intellisense for JScript along with type inference which lets Visual Studio glean the type of a variable or the return value of a method by analyzing the code. Also new "hacks" are added to allow for XML comments in JScript and referencing .js files with other .js files. I call them hacks due to the fact that they really are comments formed in a special way which Visual Studio looks for; in essence they only work in VS. It's still nice to have though :)

Interestingly the CSS designer from Expression Web Designer will be available in Visual Studio which basically renders the entire Express Web Designer SKU moot in my opinion. In any case I'm glad that we'll have the designer in VS as I was actually thinking that Web Designer would be a product I'd need to install to get at it. The design surface is codenamed Sapphire by the way, you can always count on Microsoft to come up with some really cool codenames only to have them screwed up by marketing later on :I)

Finally we have Blinq which to me is the single biggest innovation in VS Orcas. If you are unfamiliar with Blinq it's basically a tool for generating a data entry web frontend based on the schema of your database. In the future Blinq will be able to generate a partial frontend based on your selection but for now it generates for the entire database schema. Also it will be able to target object to leverage our existing business objects. As you might have guess from the name Blinq utilizes LINQ to get at the data. Blinq allows for very  rapid prototyping of a web site kind of like what Ruby on Rails does. It's very nice to see Microsoft taking cues from other communities than the .NET one. Sadly this might mean the end for Subsonic before it even gets off the ground for real. Pity.

All in all a solid presentation. As it was the last presentation of the day a measure of quality would be my yawn rate which was way down in spite of the time of day :D