Microsoft’s upcoming Visual Studio 2008 development tools platform, formerly codenamed “Orcas,” is set to offer performance improvements in common scenarios, a Microsoft official said in his blog on Thursday.S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, cited the new LINQ (Language Integrated Query Facility) as one area where performance is key. But LINQ is not out-performing in every case.“In our testing, LINQ does in fact out-perform SqlDataAdaptor on almost every test case we tried, and in many of the exceptions, it is no more than 10 percent slower than using a SqlDataReader to accomplish the same task. Given the power of LINQ, we feel this is a very reasonable trade-off,” Somasegar said. Performance improvements for multi-core hardware also is a focus. In other improvements, rebuilding a Visual Basic project and running a background compiler is three times faster and uses three times less memory, Somasegar said. Scrolling of large C# files also is faster, as is typing in new text. Response time for IntelliSense with large types in C# is as much as 10 times faster, he said.Incremental build times are faster on C++/CLI projects, Somasegar said. TFS (Team Foundation Server) Version Control command processing was re-written to support unlimited size operations on key commands sans being memory-bound on the server, he said. Commands run 10 percent to 60 percent faster with the larger improvements associated with bigger projects. Visual Studio 2008 is due for release later this year. Software Development