Visual Studio 2005 launched

Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft's latest and most powerful development environment has launched - but has it been rushed?

BY KIRAN BELOSE

10 Nov, 2005: Microsoft launched its VISUAL STUDIO 2005 on 7th of November in the US. The accompanying launch tours will continue till 15th of this month in Europe.

Visual Studio 2005 is Microsoft's development environment and is mainly focused on the Microsoft Developers community, administrators of .Net Applications and advancement in performance of .Net applications. Alongside Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft also announced release of SQL Server 2005 (code name : Yukon) and Biztalk server.

Developer Productivity

The Web Part framework is a new development methodology in Visual Studio 2005 for Web based applications. Reusable and customisable portal application very similar to Microsoft Share Point Portal server 2003, extending personalization, content aggregation, and data localisation features which are very useful for portal-based web applications.

Master Pages in Visual Studio 2005 (Code name: Whidbey) will make developers job easier to maintain a consistent design theme across a portal or a web application. You’ll only need to write the common pieces once - in the master page. A master page can serve as a template for one or more web forms. Each ASPX web form only needs to define the content unique to itself, and this content will plug into specified areas of the master page layout.

Intellisense Everywhere 

Besides intellisense within code, Developer can take full advantage of Intellisense within the script blocks in single file ASP.NET pages. In addition, Visual Studio 2005 “Whidbey” also supports Intellisense for ASP.NET Page Directives and for inline CSS style attributes within a page. Visual Studio “Whidbey” also provides Intellisense for all sections within a Web.Config configuration file, as well as any generic XML file that contains a DTD or XML Schema reference.

Better HTML formatting 

Tag Outlining (collapse and expand), per tag formatting, Browser specific validation of the scripts, code refactoring. 

Intellitask is like a super smart clipboard designed for working with code. Intellitask improves your productivity by enabling you to easily apply standard code snippets anywhere within the source editor. Visual Studio 2005 has Intellitask with 200 code snippets shipped alongwith it.

Besides the main features elaborated above, improved personalization and configuration tools with minimum code for user preferences and settings are on offer. Role Management and Membership functionality, 45 new server controls and ASP.NET controls are now mobile enabled.

Administration and Management in Visual Studio 2005

New configuration management APIs for automatic management of configuration files.

Admin tool that plugs into the existing IIS Administration to change any settings with web server or change any settings with existing configuration files.

Enhanced deployment utility, precompiled a dynamic ASP.NET application prior to deployment. 

As per the whitepapers published by Microsoft even the content of .aspx files is removed as part of the compile phase. This feature must be a option and not a default functionality -- otherwise search engines won't find any html to crawl into on such web applications or web portals.

New tracing features will enable administrators to capture run-time and request data from a production server to better diagnose issues.

VISUAL STUDIO TEAM SYSTEM project will replace Visual Source safe version controlling system, but this is not confirmed yet.

Speed and Performance

Visual Studio 2005 "Whidbey" is 64-bit enabled, Automatic JIT Compilation to native 64-bit applications automatic database server cache invalidation will enable web applications take advantage of complete power of new high range servers.

Issues and warnings over Visual Studio 2005 "Whidbey" Release

After having worked on the beta release of Whidbey and Yukon, most of the Microsoft and mini-Microsoft bloggers are considering the Visual Studio release a bit early. Though Microsoft has committed to service packs after this release, the company has not given any further details. Developers might end up in late-night code disasters, just to find Microsoft announcing that some of the bugs as known issues till the next release.

Code Refactoring function creates total chaos in code - please don't try it in web projects. Till the launch of RTM, all the bugs were known to Microsoft and somehow all of them are closed now - mostly due to time constraint. This is Microsoft’s way of suggesting ways to live with the known issues.

With list of issues known with the RTM (Release to Manufacture), the developer could end up in endless wait for the service packs on which there are no further details other then commitments from Microsoft.

Visual Studio 2005, Beginning of Next generation coding factory

Visual Studio 2005 is a next generation development tool rather than a framework. There is not much deviation in .Net Framework (CLR and Base libraries) other than the web parts design framework, some strong features like Manage compilation of Database scripts and 200 or more server side components shipped with the RTM.

Microsoft has always constantly influenced the personality and coding style of the developer. 

A developer starting his career with this technology will be doing more and more of configurations tools, drag-drops and wizards. New product launches of Microsoft are always making things easier to do. That may not always be a good thing. A developer who adopted ActiveX and OLE as cutting edge and end-of-the-world technologies is the one who knows what lies beneath the latest tools, plug ins and the add-ins. A programmer, beginning his career in this new easy development environment may never know intricacies of the technology, and can lead to unforeseen problems.

This can be seen as knowledge centralisation (it remains with Microsoft unless you care to see base libraries) which is both good and bad - we don't know. 

Releases after Visual Studio 2005 are expected in 2007 (Visual studio 2007, codename : Orcas and in 2009, Codename : Hawaii).