Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Yesterday, I attended a little demo by the campus MS representatives about the just released Visual Studio 2005. I took some notes so I could share my revelations with you, my faithful audience.

So, here we go:

• There is VS 2005 and VS Express 2005. The express does allows you to use only one language in any one project. The idea behind it, is to give students (with easily corruptable minds, something to get used to). The most interesting thing, however is…it is a free download. The presenter said: “totally free,” but I am certain he was referring to the financial aspect only.
• Throughout the two hour presentation, the phrase “[it] has nicer look; new icons” was repeated over and over. For those of you who didn’t see what VS 2005 looks like, it has a feel that is a lot like Office XP.
• The presenter also stressed the fact that, now you can customize the interface a lot more. The example he gave, was brace style — at the end of line or on a new line? He even refered to Eclipse in such a way that: “You know all those cool things you were able to do in Eclipse for years? Well, guess what! Now, you can do them in VS as well!
• VS now has a bunch of rather boring things, that supposedly are exciting…
• JavaDoc like thing, except instead of saying things like ’@foo bar’ you have to say ’<foo>bar</foo>’
• Code refactoring tool

There are however some interesting things…

• You can save your IDE settings to a file, and move the file between computers; this way you can have your brace settings wherever you go (assuming they have VS 2005)
• You have a built in DB browser. I think you can use ODBC, but I’m not sure. I know you can connect to MSSQL and MS Access.

Then there is the nice idea, but I wouldn’t trust it features:

• Query designer for MSSQL/Access
• VS comes with a built in web server! Supposedly, it is quite locked down, but knowing what Microsoft considers the definition of secure, I’m rather skeptical.

There are a number of sample “this is how you code” applications included with it, for example, a Movie Collection Application which uses MSSQL to store the data. Interesting as a howto, but I’m affraid of people actually using it for home collections == MSSQL on boxes of people that do not really know how to secure them.

That’s it really. Overall, I must say VS has the feel of Office — has a lot of “cool” features that are mostly unused.