Visual Studio 2005

[Miksu]

Microsoft is releasing the final version of Visual Studio 2005 this November. Anyone currently using the beta 2 version? I've been playing with it for couple weeks and this far I like it quite much. It's buggy, slow and crashes damn often but still it feels like a good step forward from the last VS.

I've been using only the VB-part of the VS so I'm not sure how the things are when using C#. Hopefully I can find some freetime so that I can test it at home. Previously I've used only C# and never VB.NET but now with a new job I've had to learn to do some VB.NET programming too.

 

[Richard]

Could you give some examples on the improvements from VS 7.1? I've been meaning to give 2005 a try (especially since I want to tinker with the Avalon/WinFX beta 1) but I'm not too keen on installing beta software. Your account of the problems with 2005's beta 2 is not helping but I might bite the bullet if the improvements are worthwhile.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Refactoring is included without having to buy plugins to do it.
Better integration of documentation within VS as well as a nicer interface.

 

[Miksu]

Refactoring is included without having to buy plugins to do it.

Yep. Though with VB.NET you still have to download (free) 3rd party refactoring-tool. It isn't included in VS by default.

Better integration of documentation within VS as well as a nicer interface.

Aye. Though the new interface seems kinda slow currently. In some situations atleast. Maybe it's better in the final product.

Also included is great many new components from which some of the data-components are quite useful. Program's configuration file support is now integrated in the IDE. Same with resource-files. Clickonce allows you to publish your windowsforms program in a web server, allowing it to be easily updated. Support for this is also included in the IDE.

There's also some kind of Visio integrated into the VS. I've not used it much yet, but it allows you to see and create classes in common uml-format.

And then there's new "Data sources" tab which should help you creating DB-programs. I've only tried it so I can't say if it's useful.

Debugger is also better and shows you more information. For example you can see inside your collection by just pointing it with a mouse.

As a conclusion I could comment that almost everything seems to be streamlined so that it takes you fewer clicks to achieve your goal.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Yep. Though with VB.NET you still have to download (free) 3rd party refactoring-tool. It isn't included in VS by default.

Personally I wouldn't want to look at VB.NET or anything similar ever again.

 

[Miksu]

Yep. Though with VB.NET you still have to download (free) 3rd party refactoring-tool. It isn't included in VS by default.

Personally I wouldn't want to look at VB.NET or anything similar ever again.

Heheh. I would take C# over VB.NET any day. But currently I can't do anything about it.

 

[Diplo]

The main improvement they need to implement is to make Web Projects usable and not a joke. They also need to realise that targetting schemas to IE and not W3C standards makes Visual Studio useless for writing standards-compliant, accessible (X)HTML based code.

 

[DarN]

I saw a video on channel 9 about this. I think they got the standards part sorted, Diplo.

 

[Frank]

Are the improvements worth the money?

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Are the improvements worth the money?

I'd wait until the end of the year when #Develop 2.0 comes out and then make the final judgement.