In the keynote of the VSLive conference (NY 30 th of july) Eric Rudder presented the MS "roadmap" for the coming year. I wasn't at the conference but watched it on the web. A somewhat tiring "experience" as the sound quality was pretty bad. A lot of clipping and it was impossible to understand some parts of it. People who attended the live version of the event were possibly not better of. Frequently you could hear the howl of microphone feedback.
Anyway, it was woth seeing. Eric told that the first beta's had been handed out this week to a small group of selected developers. A public beta is on its way and MS will hand out "new VS.NET technology" on the PDC at the end of october. Included in the keynote was a sneak preview of Whidbey. It didn't contain any stuff which had not been on "radio trottoir" lately but it was great to see how it had been implemented in the product.
FTP online have made a separate clip of the Whidbey demo : http://www.ftponline.com/reports/vsliveny/2003/whidbey/. The sound is still bad, but the sight is great. Enjoy.
Peter