So, after about 6 hours of trying to install, I've gotten the VS 2005 December CTP installed. I can say that the December CTP has made a lot of progress. Some things are a lot faster (say, ASP.NET building). A lot of stuff feels unpolished (icons). Some things are silly: F7 (“View Code“) is broken... had to manually set it. At any rate, I'm gonna come out and look like a dumbass, since I'm now gonna spend n hours re-installing Beta 1 :P.

One kick ass thing is that the dialogs are FAST now. Before, it seemed like old Windows Forms: you could see things painting (the refactoring dialogs are a good example). Now, it seems like real Windows. There other code editor enhancements (I noticed some new error colours)

Some stuff is just unusable. Like, I don't know... say, building and viewing errors. For some reason, I had to build about 20 times to get through all the errors. And no, they were not errors that stopped a file from compiling that need to have a rebuild, nope. Just simple things dealing with ASP.NET.

I get obsolete warnings, saying I should move to other classes (ConfigurationManager)... but these classes don't exist. So there goes compiling with warnings as errors :). No big deal.

Typed Data Adapters got some changes. Typed data adapters now have Connection[String]? as a protected field (as far as I can tell), breaking my code, forcing me to do changes (subclass the adapter) for no reason, other than to annoy me. Yea, it's all one gigantic cosmic plan to screw up my project ;).

What the hell is the obession with naming a freaking connection when “designing“? Data adapters, web services, etc.: I wanna link all that up at runtime. But no, it insists on having me select a “connection“. Then it dumps it into an app.config (even for library projects). What ever happened to “the developer has some clue of what he's doing, so let him handle it“? I understand that script kiddies are customers too, and sometimes you just drag and drop and presto: a full data app. Hey, I write one-off code sometimes too.

ASP.NET is still in transition here. First, it bitches about having a bin and Application_Assemblies directory, forcing you to rename (since you can't delete the Application_Assemblies dir). Of course, they have now realised this was retarded and fixed it (called it bin) in future builds (Beta 2). They also went though another fit with the directives (CompilesWith, CodeFile, CodeBehind, Inherits, ClassName... wtf?). Fortunately, it looks like they're going a step in the right direction. Of course, since I had so much trouble even getting my project to build, I could be wrong. Even so, it tossed out my old project settings (since Web Projects aren't projects, they're just folders).

There's been a lot of work invested in making it more “Community” accessible. That's all fine and dandy, but I can't envision myself ever, ever, using any of those features. Perhaps for VS Express/Academic/I-learned-VBA-and-thus-am-an-Enterprise-dev versions it makes sense. Just not sure what place it has in “Enterprise Architect” version.

Of course, I was forewarned that the CTPs weren't good, and that Betas are real quality, etc. etc. But, hey, I like being hopeful. And it's a good glimpse of the future. Too bad I couldn't use it and file more reports against stuff. I'll have to wait until Beta 2. :(