Installed VS.NET 2005 Release Candidate
I took a risk yesterday and went ahead an installed the Release Candidate of Visual Studio .NET 2005 on my main machine after uninstalling Beta 2. I've been running on VPC with August CTP for a few weeks and even on VPC the performance and operation of VS.NET appeared to be much smoother than Beta 2. But it's VPC - I hate working in VPC other than testing. But I've been hesitant to blow away my Beta 2 install, since it's been stable and my past experiencing trying to uninstall VS and then reinstalling a new version haven't been the most successful resulting in machine re-installs most of the time.
Uninstalling and re-installing versions of Visual Studio in the past has been a major pain point, but I’m happy to report that following the uninstall directions resulted in a good install first try… Well, almost. My MSDN install didn’t let me see any dev topics, so I had to run Repair on that install, but after that all was well.
I haven’t spent much time with it yet, but on first look this is a much improved install. Most noticeable is the much improved performance of the IDE, which no longer seems to hang up and be stuck ‘thinking’ between clicks and keystrokes.
A number of things that had me quite a bit worried in the IDE was performance of Compilation of largish Web sites especially but it looks like the performance of the site compilation is now much quicker and up to what you’d expect (in fact faster than VS 2003). It also uses incremental compilation for the Web sites which wasn’t the case before and was the main reason for the slowness in Beta 2 I suspect.
I also noticed that debugging performance has gotten much better especially using the internal Web Server. Starting a project for the first time is much quicker and applications running seem to be much snappier as well.
The other good news is that other than the changes that occurred in ScriptCallbacks in ASP.NET in August CTP (the ICallbackEventHandler interface changed to two methods instead of one), the 3 Web apps and the 5 or so WinForm utility apps running Beta 2 all updated without any problems that I can tell so far. It’s going to take some retesting and checking before I can trust that assessment, but the code compiles and there are no errors in preliminary test runs.
I’m relieved to see the stability and performance improvements in VS.NET. Although I realize that Beta 2 was still a ways off from release there were A LOT of quirks in it and it was a bit scary to see so many loose ends that late in the game. The RC seems to be addressing most of these issues.
One thing that does seem to be broken is the Font configuration. A number of the font options don't seem to work right. I can't seem to get my string background set and some of the text options (like keywords) will not go bold properly (for presentation size). Setting fonts in VS.NET is a PITA anyway, but unless I'm missing some new options I cannot figure out how to get my main code view text to go bold...
Still, I’m stoked – now if I could only deploy the RC bits… grrr. I’m tired of waiting… <g>