Visual Studio 2005 July CTP: bugs fixed, VB.NET still slow, other improvements
I apologize that it has been a while since I have posted anything on my blog. I have several ideas in the pipeline, including some management posts, but both professional and personal enterprises have kept me from actually creating any content.
I have been working with July Community Technology Preview of VS 2005. I had already mentioned that many bugs in Beta 2 had been fixed in the June CTP. By using the July CTP more in-depth (including at a customer's site), I have indeed been able to validate that those bugs have been resolved.
I have to say though that the environment works a lot better for C# than it does for VB.NET (at this time). I believe that VB.NET's background compiler still has some issues left. Even though the memory leak is gone, the environment is really slow when a line is being edited where a warning or error occurs. It may take 5-7 seconds before the environment responds again. (This is running VS 2005 July CTP (team suite) in a virtual machine (MS Virtual PC) on Windows XP Professional SP 2 with 512 MB of RAM).
There are several new features in the IDE I like a lot. I believe that for managing projects, the most important improvement is that "solution folders" can now be created which allow the solution's projects to be grouped together logically instead of allowing only alphabetical listings. I've seen that a popular way of grouping projects in a solution goes something like this: "Client", "Server", "Service Interfaces", "Data Access", etc. In other words, grouping the projects by the logical application layer to which their output belongs. This is also my first use for the solution folders. I am wondering if anyone has a more creative use for solution folders?