Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition Complete package

...to deserve its 2005 title, Microsoft finally released Visual Studio 2005, the current release, after a prolonged beta phase. As with previous guises, it is available in a number of versions. This review covers the Pro or professional release that can be picked up for between £550 and £650. The major difference between this and the more expensive Team System is, well, the lack of Team System. Team System is an extremely powerful set of tools aimed ...
...languages, a generous move by Microsoft if you don't need all the bells and whistles of the full blown Pro toolset.

Professional Toolset

It's probably best to say what major components you get with the pro version of Visual Studio 2005. You get VC++, C#, VB and VJ# along with appropriate forms editors complete with mobile support, code snippets, database tools and designers. You also get editor support for XML and XSLT, ... more

Before I go any further, I'll say this review is for a product that would only be of use to people with a developer background and as such assumes that the reader will know what all the acronyms and buzzwords mean. I don't explain them in layman's terms as it just wouldn't make sense given the subject. On we go..

Only just in time to deserve its 2005 title, Microsoft finally released Visual Studio 2005, the current release, after a prolonged beta phase. As with previous guises, it is available in a number of versions. This review covers the Pro or professional release that can be picked up for between £550 and £650. The major difference between this and the more expensive Team System is, well, the lack of Team System. Team System is an extremely powerful set of tools aimed at better integration and communication across the entire product lifecycle from design through to testing. For home coders, there are also individual free versions of development environments for the main languages, a generous move by Microsoft if you don't need all the bells and whistles of the full blown Pro toolset.

Professional Toolset

It's probably best to say what major components you get with the pro version of Visual Studio 2005. You get VC++, C#, VB and VJ# along with appropriate forms editors complete with mobile support, code snippets, database tools and designers. You also get editor support for XML and XSLT, release versions of all the x64bit compilers (although for Itanium support you'll need to go for the Team System version), SQL Server Reporting Services as well as Crystal Reports and the developer version of SQL Server 2005. All in all, a lot of software for your money although it's worth checking what is extra over the free version as you may find everything you need is in the latter.

IDE Improvements

The IDE has had a huge overhaul aimed at increasing productivity. One particularly useful feature is the ability to see what code has been changed and if it's been saved. I personally find this very useful when making changes in different paces and in different files. It makes it much easier keeping your current position clear in your mind. Code snippets let you drop in sections of prewritten code, either complete or in framework form. Something similar was available before but it's now easier to use. It has a good selection of code chunks already supplied to get you going.

Another big improvement is in how smart the editor is when it comes to renaming in code. Previously you'd need to hunt through the code if you wanted to rename a method, variable or whatever. Now you can do the whole thing in one hit with the editor intelligently making all the changes for you. Equally useful is the ability to quickly show all references to a class in your code.

The new Class Designer replaces an earlier incarnation and allows you to visually design a class and its methods, properties and relationships. The designer then generates the actual code for you.

A neat improvement is the Server Explorer which lets you browse any server based resources such as message queues, logs, web servers and so on. You can even drag and drop these on to your project allowing your applications to work with these.

Less good is the lack of a built in source control system. You can of course pay extra for Microsoft's own Visual SourceSafe. On the plus side, Microsoft have now opened up the protocols used for communicating with source control systems opening up the option of more 3rd party tools that will interact directly with Visual Studio 2005.

One excellent new feature is the ability to export your current IDE settings. The IDE has a dizzyingly large number of options, modes and ways of working that once you get a comfortable working environment, the thought of replicating it on a new machine is not pleasant. Visual Studio 2005 lets you export all your settings in one go and then import them in to another copy on a different PC. For developers who hot desk or share machines this will be a godsend.

Finally, you get a whole bunch of new icons and images to ensure your VS 2005 applications have the look and feel of the latest Office and Windows releases.

Debugging

A welcome step forward is support for edit/continue debugging in all the major languages i.e. VC++, C# and VB. This allows you to edit code on the fly whilst running it. Older VB6 developers have been particularly keen on getting this functionality and at last, it's here. As would be expected with the 64bit compilers, 64bit debugging is available. What isn't available outside the Team System version is code profiling. It would have been nice to have got this in the Pro version too.

ClickOnce

A significant enhancement to the usual deployment methods is ClickOnce. This allows you to create a self contained application that can be installed from a CD, network share or web page. Once installed, the application can be configured to automatically update itself as and when new versions become available. More interestingly, ClickOnce applications can be configured to run from a network share so they don't add anything permanently on the PC that runs them. Once the application exits, there will be nothing installed or left behind on the user's PC. In some respects, they could be viewed as a new type of web based application method.

Projects

A new format has been created for Projects and older ones are upgraded automatically via a wizard. Of note here are temporary projects which allow you to quickly try an idea or concept without going to the hassle of creating a new project hierarchy on your hard drive. Temporary projects exist in memory only and once finished with, are gone. I can imagine this becoming quite a popular feature.

Visual Basic

Visual Basic has at long last got back what many VB6 developers have been after, Edit & Continue. This allows you to tinker with your code whilst debugging. You can step through some code, change a variable and then continue working. There was a huge uproar when this disappeared from Visual Basic .net but now it's back.

VB now conforms properly to the Common Language Specification making it far more easy to mix and match between VB, C#, C++ etc when coding. It is still possible to write non conformant code but the compiler will thrown up a warning if it comes across anything.

Another item being welcomed back is the Continue statement. New though is the IsNot statement which makes for tidier code. You also get support for generics (as does C#) which is another often requested feature.

One new feature I particularly liked is the 'My' feature which provides a short cut to a huge chunk of the .Net framework and its functionality including the run time environment and default instances of various commonly used objects.

Visual C#

As well as generics, C# has grown static classes which makes life a lot easier. Now you can access class members without having to instantiate the class itself. Ideal for small toolkit type functions.

A whole slew of changes to support refactoring are also included. Refactoring has been getting a lot of interest in recent years and now C# users can start to make greater use of it.

The new and improved class designer has meant a lot of existing C# wizards have gone but the new tool is good enough to ensure they won't be missed.

Like VB, C# now has the ability to Edit & Continue which is really good news and makes for much easier debugging.

Visual C++

C++ has a new syntax for CLR programming as well as improved support for managed code. Whilst there are no real Earth shattering changes, Microsoft have made a huge number of small but effective changes in almost all areas of the compiler and IDE improving usability, stability, security and productivity (and any other 'ity' things you can mention.

Crystal Reports

CR has been updated to support the new ClickOnce deployment system. It also has improved design time preview options. New users will appreciate a raft of new templates to help beginners get up to speed with using Crystal as quickly as possible. You can also modify the look of a report using CSS.

ASP.NET

The new environment fully support ASP.NET 2 and all its new objects and provides a robust and integrated web site development system. Existing Visual Studio .net 2002 or 2003 projects will need some upgrading to the new format though. You also get an improved code-behind model with more flexibility.

Conclusion

Visual Studio Pro 2005 has made the whole Visual Studio package a far more rounded tool. Lots of changes both large and small have all helped to make programmer's lives easier and added real productivity changes as well as adding support for 64bit and new Microsoft technologies. VB Programmers should see this as a must have upgrade, others who code day in day out should also consider the move. For the occasional coder there is less here of interest especially given the availability of free cut down versions. All in all though, a good solid upgrade from Microsoft that was worth the wait.  

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