I’m a little late blogging about the MVP Summit – it finished on the 15^th – but I’ve only arrived home yesterday.  The wife and I took the opportunity to do some tripping around – more on this later.

The Summit this year was great.  It was very well organized, the venue’s – Seattle’s Convention Center & Microsoft – were spacious and accessible.  Transportation was very easy and well organized this time.

As usual, we also got to here from some great & famous speakers, including: Bill Gates, Anders Hejlsberg & Scott Guthrie – all of which were highlights in one way or another.  We also got to learn about a few upcoming products and new releases – much of which I cannot repeat here – but here’s a few teasers.

• Orcas – there are a lot of nice new features and enhancements in this – particularly around testing, Javascript, AJAX, design etc.  Debugging and development Javascript is a place I am very keen to see enhancements on and we saw some nice demos of improvements in these areas (including a fix for a long running complaint from many people).  I think the March CTP has some or all of these features included already so check it out.
• ASP.Net v Next – Scott talked about and demo’d a few new features of the next version of ASP.Net in Orcas.  Again, I think this stuff is probably in the March CTP but without looking I’m not willing to risk the lawyers!  Lets just say that you will see more code-less provider model type things a some new controls that will save you a LOT of coding.
• LINQ – Anders did a great demo of LINQ for Objects & SQL.  If you have been living in a cave and not heard of LINQ or have been ignoring it then RUN – don’t walk – to your nearest search engine and learn as much as you can about it now!  LINQ will change the way you work with objects and data in ways you may not have realized… eg PLINQ.
• AJAX – Scott demoed some of the new Orcas features for AJAX.  He also detailed some features of the current release I was unaware of, including pageLoad().  There’s a great blog post here that shows how to use this and some other nifty features.
• Team System – Rosario is the code name for VSTS after Orcas.  There’s not much public information on this so I can’t say anything but the very few tidbits I did here about it sounds intriguing. Use your imagination and look at some of the research and tools the team has been talking about and you will get a fair idea of where they are heading.
• Lastly, some estimated delivery schedules were mentioned for Orcas & Longhorn… and I’m certainly not going to repeat those but it’s safe to say – I think – that by this time next year I’ll be blogging about Orcas SP1 :]