Visual Studio 2005 CTP - Initial Observations

Well, since the Community Previews are publically available, I'm going to go ahead and talk a bit about my personal observations regarding the CTP DVD.

Microsoft has done a lot of work between the PDC bits and this drop, on all fronts. First and foremost is Setup. Microsoft got rid of all that prerequisite BS... it's now a part of the central installer. One process, one set of notifications. It was fabulous. Setup is greatly simplified in other ways as well.

Visual Studio Tools for Office (Codename "Trinity") is now slipstreamed into VS2005. I'm assuming that means that you will no longer have to shell out 150 clams for it as an add-on. Also of note is the new SourceSafe bits. SourceSafe now works over HTTP, which I believe is using ASP.NET and IIS. I haven't tried it out yet, but at some point I will do a point-by-point comparison with Vault, which I just installed on my servers last week.

The MSDN installation stuff was much sexier than in 2003. The graphic is way cooler, and now there is even a new install option called "scoped", which "installs documentation based on your Visual Studio feature selection." How cool is that? It installs exactly what you need based on your options in the previous install.

For any of you that may have been wondering, Whitehorse IS in the CTP bits. I've played around with it for about 5 minutes, and all I can say is... WOW. Man, I'm going to have fun with this. Microsoft won't let you deploy .NET 2.0 apps yet, but what's to say you can't use all this cool engineering stuff to whip out some code, and then open it up in 2003 and compile there? NOTHING. HA! Building killer apps just got a whole lot easier.

I've got a LOT of playing around to do, so I'd better get to it. More info later.

3 Comments

  • Hi Robert,



    I've been playing with VS 2005 for about a week. OH my gosh, it rocks. I'm jealous for those who have seen formal presentations about vs 2005. I posted a couple of opinions on my blog both on weblogs.asp.net/steveschofield and my personal blog @ adminblogs about 1st impressions on VS 2005. Keep up-to-date on your experiences on VS. 2005. Thanks for the great blog info!

  • robert:



    if you do you vault w/ vs 2005, be aware that the integrated client may not work correctly.



    the vs 2005 ctp bits are still a little too fresh that we haven't done any testing, but if you do have a positive experience, please let us know.



    just a heads-up.

    jeff clausius

    sourcegear

  • Hi Robert



    How do you get to the whitehorse bits in VS 2005 (May)



    Its the one part I'm really to explore but cannot find it

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