Public Class GeoffAppleby

Using VS2005 Beta 1 (Part 1)

Well, thanks to TechEd, i finally got my grubby little paws on a copy of the VS2005 Beta.

Over the last couple of days i've been installing a new Virtual PC and getting it going. Has anyone missed out on checking out Virtual PC? It's a damn schmick little product, i have to say. Anyway, so far it's all working very well indeed, and the changes to VS are very well received on my end.

At this stage what i've done is:

• Had a play around in the different options. The settings you can change are a bit more extensive than in VS2003, probably the most notable feature in there is being able to set some defaults for when creating new database tables and stuff.
• Created a new Forms project, and dumped on the new MenuStrip, ToolStrip, and Status strip. Man, these things are great! Menus and toolbars are now what they should have been since VB6. You can move them around, dock them where you like, put proper images on them, put a progress bar on the status bar, it's all good. And, the tool and menu strips have a 'add standard items' feature, that goies and adds some standard toolbar buttons / menu items, including graphics, for you.
• Created a database project. This hasn't really changed, that i could see.
• Created a SQLServerProject in C#. I had no idea what this was, but when i seleced 'Add new stored procedure' i was blown away - it set up the skeleton to write a stored procedure in C#, not TSQL. Obviously this is a Yukon thing, but holy crap, this is interesting! The doco's not fantastic yet (athough reasonable), but i can't wait to have a proper play with this once i get my hands on a full Yukon beta. (I'm a little loath to try out SQL Express, when i want the full thing :)
• Created a new web site. This was interesting. At first i was a little annoyed that adding a website/webservice project wasn't in the same dialog as the rest of the new project items, but i think i can forgive it given what i've seen already.
  • No more requirement on IIS - it only wanted a file location, not a url for where to create the project.
  • It comes with it's own web server, so it can serve your web sites. I haven't found a nice way to configure the port it runs on yet, i'm not sure how much choice there is yet - i think i need to do a whole heap of reading about this little web server.
  • There's still the same old issues with trying to block comment or uncomment html like you can with real code.
  • It still changes the id attributes of elements when you paste in new html.
  • Over all tho, it's looking pretty good.
• Spent an hour or so posting in all the bugs and suggestions i could think of  to the product feedback centre.

It really is a pretty good looking product, if you haven't tried it, you really should!!

I haven't actually tried to write any code yet, so next up i'll be looking at what the code editor is like, and start playing with some of the language enhancements - i'm really looking forward to seeing the class designer.