Review: Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Pro - Part 1

Iain Laskey gets to grips with Microsoft's latest version of Visual Studio. It may have lost the .net moniker but it's gained a whole lot more.

Product	Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Pro - Part 1
Company	Microsoft
Web	msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio
Price	Pro version £575. Upgrade £375.
We like	Solid toolset, real productivity improvements, edit/continue debugging
We don't like	No code profiling or source control, slightly suspect UK pricing
Rating	9/10
Requirements

Only just in time to deserve its 2005 title, Microsoft have finally released Visual Studio 2005 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. 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 versions of development environments for the main languages. Microsoft have confirmed that these will be free for the next year - a generous move and if you don't need all the bells and whistles of the full blown Pro toolset, these are well worth looking at.

Professional Toolset

It's probably best to say what major components you do 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.

In Part 2 I'll be looking at the new language support in more detail. Meanwhile, I know it's an old chestnut but note the interesting GBP versus USD pricing on the left...

 

Iain Laskey
See Iain's site at www.pcbookreview.com