Orcas, Vista, Linq, WPF, XNA ????

So a buddy and I have been wanting to play around with some of the very new and exciting upcoming technologies from Microsoft, well I guess Vista is officially out now. We didn't do a whole lot of research when we began this endeavor, I guess we were just a little excited. So here is the lowdown :)

Vista comes with the new .net 3.5 framework so this was good since Linq and WPF use it. Orcas is the new Visual Studio that will be used to take advantage of all of these new features, so this should be good. Well...... maybe :(

Orcas (Jan CTP) installed without a hitch, and seemed to work pretty good. The first thing we tried to do was play around with Linq. We found the '101 samples' website for Linq and started writing some queries. This was a 'no-go', VS didn't seem to like the syntax. We started to think 'What gives!' so we began our Google searches. Apparently you need to reference the 'System.Core.dll' which is found 'Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\'.. Whoa.. you think this would be a little more straight-forward since this is a new feature that showcases the new .NET 3 and Orcas. Anyways after some looking around we got it working. It's pretty neat to say the least!

Next was WPF. Orcas didn't come pre-loaded with a WPF template? hmmm. 'Okay there must be a plugin' we thought. The only plugin we could find was for VS2005! This was no good, we wanted to use the new Orcas and the new WPF to write some new applications! Oh well, guess we'll be waiting on that one AND using 2005 for development, bummer.

Last but not least was XNA, surely this must work I mean it's a release version now and VS2005 kinda works with Vista(keep reading for this). Well you still have to have VS2005 Express to use XNA Game Studio Express. So we got this installed and then XNA. Went to load up a pacman style game we've been working on and...... NOTHING! Come to find out, after some more Googling, XNA does NOT work with Vista, double bummer.

Oh and the VS2005 kinda working with Vista well... Even with the SP1 for VS2005, it still has issues. It consistantly crashes at random times, among other small issues. So I guess if you want to play around with WPF, XNA Linq and many of the other new features coming out I would stick with XP and VS2005 for a while, atleast until they get some of this worked out... So I guess we'll revisit this in a couple months ;)