Thankfully, todays chapter (based on Jason Beres book – Learn Visual Studio in 21 Days) is quite short. Its not in content, and again, I’m using Vis Studio 2005, not VS.NET 2003 as the book was intended for, but lets be frank here – who actually reads the Introduction to …. chapters? Not me, hence I will always remain an amateur.

I say thankfully because my day started at 7am (Yes, there’s two 7 o’clocks in a day Ryan) and although I was hoping to get home for 5pm, a burglar (who had the rottenest teeth I have *ever* seen) spoiled all that so by 9pm I was skipping through Chapter 2 – Introduction to Visual Studio.NET.

Some things have changed. It seem sleeker to me. Nicer. I’m a VB.NET guy, not a _real_ programmer, and so I like the loss of all that frippery. There’s a News bit which is ok, but I think it should reflect the content of WWW.ASP.NET rather than what *they* think we should get. There’s a couple of things missing - Get a Web Hoster… If you can’t find yourself a web-host in the year 2005, then you may as well quit now. 2003 used to direct people to iNNERHOST and I’m assuming they are still ok. I always like Brad Kingsleys Orcsweb though, just because he was so damn passionate about it all.

Downloads and updates have moved/gone also, which is a good thing IMO. I never ever got update to work on my work or home machine. Ever. And downloads – Google for them. It’s Today.Year.ToString for Christs’ sake.

Dynamic Help – Well, there is a “How do I” link under help, but what intrigued me more was the community links. I recall the buzz about it at the MVP conference last year but I figured MS was going to retain the old newsgroups (I can’t say it enough – IT’S 2005 – LET IT GO!!!) but I was waaay wrong. They’ve done an excellent job on it. Relevant online help, which is good for me, so that when I search for “Make a random number” I get a bunch of links under the codezone community. I was a tad upset that my old mates at www.aspadvice.com didn’t appear on the lists but I did see some old favourites in there (www.sqlteam.com, www.vbcity.com, www.sqljunkies.com)

The IDE is roughly the same. Its nowhere near as daunting as the original Visual Studio, and far more intuitive – nothing to be scared of here.

Skipping tons of things, straight to the debug menu – vastly overhauled. I believe there are some bugs within debugging that need ironing out (see Peter Brombergs article – what he said) but it still remains massively superior to what it was.

Overall, considering it’s late, I’ve worked a 14 hour day trying to outwit a halfwit (a guy with no brains and no teeth), I’m just going to skip this chapter. Some excellent advice in it though. I'm sure his updated book will be just as good.

Day 3...