Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 -- Update

I misunderstood my sources; the beta 2 bits were signed off today, but they won’t be released for download before the middle of next week.  I’d give links, but it’s all over weblogs.asp.net and blogs.msdn.com.  Ok, fine…here’s one.  Sorry for the false start.

I meant to mention this in an earlier post; I’m glad that MS is finally dropping the term .Net from most of their products.  That was a pretty big marketing blunder on their part, there are still plenty of folks out there who have no idea what .Net is (is it a product?  a service?  a platform?).  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…the single most compelling reason (IMO) to start using CLR v2.0 is anonymous methods (aka closures or lambdas in most other languages that support them); it’ll greatly tidy up event/delegate syntax (I’ll admit that I still have to hit the docs for the 1.x implementation sometimes).  Most people would argue that generics are the number one “killer feature”; I agree somewhat, though the real benefit for generics will be in consuming/using them rather than rolling your own (and I already foresee generics being abused quite a bit, along with partial classes).  Regardless, it looks like the CLR is that much closer to being a truly functional (not in the programming sense of the word) language platform.  Java is in serious need of an overhaul, it just seems to have really gotten too big for it’s own pants (JNI, EJB, JAXP, JSP, JTA, ad nauseam); so many bolton’s, so little time.  And generics in Java are nothing short of a hack; the core platform wasn’t designed to ever support generics, whereas the CLR was built with this in mind from the ground up.  I’m not going to turn this into a Java bashing post, I’ve already been there/done that.  Cheers.