Visual Studio shipped the final release of VS 2005 SP1 yesterday. It is available for immediate download in all 10 languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and both traditional and simplified Chinese). You can download and install it here.
This SP release is a pretty major service pack, and incorporates a lot of bug-fixes and feedback from customers. Included built-in with the service pack is support for VS 2005 Web Application Projects (which we also made available as a separate download back in May). It also contains a number of design-time performance optimizations and fixes across the product.
Some Suggestions on Installing the Service Pack
The service pack itself is a fairly large download (431Mb), and can take 30-90 minutes to update your Visual Studio 2005 installation depending on which versions of VS you have installed, and what features are enabled. So you should plan ahead and not expect it to be a few second operation (note: it is a good task to kick off before lunch or in the evening).
A few suggestions/comments on the setup process:
1) Before starting the SP1 upgrade make sure you first uninstall the standalone VS 2005 Web Application Project download if you've installed that on your system. You'll no longer need this as support for it is built-in to SP1, and the SP1 installer will block and make you uninstall it if you have it installed. Your existing web application project files will continue to work just fine - so you won't need to-do anything to update them to work with SP1.
2) SP1 will run the upgrade patching process on each copy of Visual Studio 2005 it finds on your system. So if you have VS 2005 Professional, Visual Web Developer Express, and Visual Basic Express on your system, it will run the patching process 3 times (since each of these installs have separate copies of some files). If you aren't using all of these versions on your system, you might want to uninstall some of them - both to save yourself some disk space as well as to speed up the SP1 install process.
3) SP1 will patch/update all files/features in VS 2005 that you have installed. Sometimes I just click "install everything" when I setup VS 2005, in which case I get a lot of features that I often don't use (for example: some of the C++ header/lib sources for ATL, MFC, etc). What I've seen on my personal system is that when I only have the features I use installed, the SP1 upgrade process takes about 15 minutes end to end. But with everything it can take closer to 45-50 minutes. You might want to consider unchecking certain features of VS if you aren't using them and want to both save some disk space as well as speed up the SP1 install process.
One last built performance suggestion
SP1 does include a number of build performance improvements (for both VB and C#). For suggestions on how to optimize Web Site and Web Project build performance with VS 2005, I also highly recommend you check out my optimizing build performance blog post here. This will help you optimize your build times significantly for both RTM and SP1 systems.
Hope this helps,
Scott
P.S. Some people have noticed that my pictures and sample downloads on my site are missing at the moment. Unfortunately the Puget Sound region was hit by a really bad storm last night, and all electrical power was knocked out in the area shortly before 1am (exactly 3 minutes after I finished my ASP.NET AJAX RC post last night - I hit submit just in time <g>). Both my house and the Microsoft campus are without power at the moment, which means the server hosting my pictures/downloads is not running. They are hoping to get us power again in the next few days, at which time my server will (fingers crossed) come back up. Until then I'm hanging out in a very crowded Starbucks for heat/light and will also be sporadic on email. Sorry in advance for any delays.