Microsoft named the date. In the latest MSDN Flash, they said: "[...] February 2008 is shaping up to be Microsoft's largest launch month - ever - with RTMs of Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008 all on tap."

Update: In case you haven't heard, Visual Studio 2008 was released on Monday 11/19. The big launch party is still planned for February in Las Vegas.

In the meantime, Rico Mariani concludes his series on LINQ To SQL performance. It looks like it will be easy to get performance virtually on par with manually optimized code using SqlDataReader directly. That's great news, especially if you realize that most code today isn't manually optimized that way. For example, based on the figures he gives, I expect that LINQ To SQL will outperform the TableAdapters and typed DataSets you generate in Visual Studio 2005.

Unfortunately, we can't verify this yet, since the current Orcas Beta 1 doesn't have the optimizations they did to get to this result. But Beta 2 should have them, and that's due to be available "later this summer". That means it might be around when I'm back from my holidays!