Visual Studio 2005...

Have been playing with the Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 a bit over the last couple of weeks. In general it is looking pretty solid. Although my first attempt at playing with the new Compact Framework did not go well at runtime in the emulator, see the bug report here.

I have been largely playing with the new generics stuff and it is way cool - it will save so much code, simplify development and improve quality. So far I have one suggestion and one bug; but otherwise, all is very good indeed.

The IDE is looking really good and the integrated unit testing is also a great addition. I have a question related to the unit testing; when a test fails how does one then debug the test through the test infrastructure (I see someone else is having the same issue) - as yet I have not discovered how and have resorted to creating a quick and dirty console app to replicate and fix. A less than ideal scenario :-(

Am looking forward to playing with the new Windows Forms stuff over the coming weeks to see what improvements have been done here. At first glance there looks to be a bunch of groovy new controls; plus the Click Once stuff is a welcome addition to simplifying the Smart Client deployment.