Visual studio 2005 vs 2008

Hi chaps,

Just thought I’d write this small post for those developers using Microsoft’s Programming IDE Visual Studio 2005 and thinking of upgrading to 2008.

My first impression was that the only thing different was that the made the IDE controls have a tint of blue...
Well to be frank, tats all they have done graphically to the IDE.

Performance wise, they have improved it 100%, compiling c++ or large c#/vb.net applications tends not to hang as much, and the active debugging is more or less instant unlike vs 2005 were it found it entertaining to let the user think it had locked up...

One thing that caused a bit of a chew when they released vs 2005 was the fact you had no choice to program in .net framework 1, they made you use .net framework 2, well Microsoft has actually took notice this time, we can now chose whether to use .net framework 2,3 or 3.5 when creating a new project.

One thing that programmers might not like is the fact we no longer have j# shipped with the pro version of vs, even tho I tend not to use j# I still noticed it missing.

Overall, Microsoft have done a good job with this release, it’s a big step from the things that are annoying in vs 2005, It seems they have took notice of their customers and instead of adding a lot of junk they have worked on making things better.

I’ll keep this post updated for anyone Interested, and would like to see other people’s opinions on this as well.

Cheers,
Philly

Hi. I have been using the VS 2008 Standard Edition Beta 2 for C# on my XP machine. Soon I'll be moving it to Vista. The thing I find curious is MS acts like the Standard Edition doesn't exist. It seems like they either want to give you the Express Edition for nothing, or sell you the Professional Edition for a bundle!!

The type of applications I write are small Windows utilities or components/controls. So I have no need for Team VCS elements or Enterprise Middleware. Just need lots of drop-on components to make
things easy.

btw I'm curious if they fixed the broken help links in the released Standard Edition. Kind of a pain when every search or F1 while cursor is on the subject fails and you have to manually use the search function.

Other than that though, I could use my ActiveX Controls and I like the way the editor does formatting and lint on the fly.