Recently Microsoft released a CTP of the next generation visual development tool. It is available to download here. If you don’t like to install raw versions of software onto your working machine, there’s a little surprise for you: the CTP is distributed as a Virtual PC image so you can download it and start playing immediately without impacting any existing software installations! Actually, the process of getting the CTP to run is slightly more complex as you also need to download another image containing a host OS etc. However, I think it’s much better than installing products that are still under development directly into the system.

In general, VS 2007 is still very, very far from the final release. Only a small part of the C# 3.0 features is supported, IntelliSense doesn’t work for many language constructs, and so on. However, this is just a technical preview. Good luck to Microsoft in development of our main working tool!