I finally got around to giving Visual Studio 2005 (beta 2) a test drive recently. Whereas my meanderings with the beta 1 bits were downright hideous, this experience has been a complete 180 from that. Installation was trouble free (and fast I might add…I’d estimate around half the time of Visual Studio 2003, and definitely much faster than beta 1 of VS2005; 20 minutes on a relatively fast machine). Startup time is very snappy as well, again faster than VS2003…most impressive.
It doesn’t appear too much was added in this release (aside from massive performance boosts); refactoring looks almost feature complete (Java weenies and their IDE’s can stop laughing at us now), and the class designer looks more feature complete than in beta 1. I still don’t like how ASP.NET applications run in a mini-browser (please give us a choice between using that and IIS…after 4+ years of IIS I’m just simply much more comfortable with it), and I still haven’t garnered an opionion on the multitude of new folders created for support files (and the underscores that seperate words in these folders is sooooo 20th century), though I do like the concept of the “code” folder in that multiple languages can be used for 1 assembly (i.e. C# for one class, VB for another class <<– in the same assembly. Hopefully I’ll never have to use VB.NET ever again). I have not given it a thorough beating yet, but it’s lookin’ really good. I can’t wait for the RTM, and have pretty much decided that as of RC1 I’m making the switch from VS2003. I’ll post more once I give beta 2 a serious run through. I’m also in the process of playing around with the latest CTP bits of SQL 2005 (I will say this though, the new management tools look great; I’ve already made the switch from SQL2k Enterprise Manager to the SQL2k5 CTP Management Studio tool…much more intuitive than EM + QA). This will be a great year for developer releases from MS methinks!
Posted
Jul 09 2005, 02:14 PM
by
Jayson Knight