As I’m sure most of the developer viewers are aware, Microsoft has officially released Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. I watched the Launch event and even though it was packed with buzz words and jargon ‘work faster, better results’, the demos were quite impressive.
The greatest thing to come out of this as far as I’m concerned are the express editions of each package, a completely free, even for commercial use, version of the software that are available now. I took some time last night and downloaded Visual C# 2005 Express and I have to say I’m very impressed in what it offers for a free software. I know I’m gonna get flamed for this, but I still say if Linux (or any other OS for that matter) offered a development suite as quick and powerful as Visual Studio, Microsoft would be in a much worse position than they are today. Anything that lets me work smartly and saves me time is good for me, plus the new refactoring tools are pretty sweet.
My current project (damn, far too many of those…) involves writing a DirectX app using C#. I’ve started moving it over to 2005 and .Net 2.0 and I have to say it works flawlessly. IntelliSense is much improved and much quicker to help you out without getting in the way, plus it seems to have a better understanding of code context which makes it freaky accurate, at least from my exprience so far.
I definitely recommend that anybody that does .Net development check out these packages, you’ll be happy you did.
PS: I’ll have some C# 2005 code samples coming soon!
