Over the past week there have been a flurry of new projects coming out of Microsoft, mostly in the form of CTP’s.  I’ve been downloading like crazy and will likely be discussing my experience with them in the coming week.  In case you missed any of them:

• Entity Framework Beta 3: Runtime components.  This is the Entity Framework installer to get the right assemblies loaded on a machine.
• Entity Framework Tools CTP2: Visual Studio 2008 designer integration for Entity Framework.  The new tools are supposed be a big leap forward from the last drop. Before you install this, you need an XML Designer patch for VS 2008 that you can get here.
• Volta: A new project from the Microsoft Live Labs  team that takes managed code and generates client-side JavaScript. The intent here is to be able to write your web client code in managed code (VB/C#) and generate the JavaScript magically including calls to the base libraries (BCL)! Interesting idea!
• Parallel Extensions for .NET 3.5 December 2007 CTP.  These are a set of libraries for simplifying the creation of multi-threaded code in a more straightforward fashion.

I expect that with the release of the EF Beta 3 means Astoria is coming soon.  I’ll let you know when it drops! Time to start digging in.