Wow.
I am going to be panting like one of Pavlov's puppies when this thing goes RTM!
As Andrew Connell said in a reply to an earlier post, “it's very nice”. Indeed.
Immediate things that I like:
* Color coding lines that have been changed and not yet saved (on the gutter to the left)
* Color coding lines that have been changed and have been saved
* Mo' better information when an exception is thrown
* Far better warnings. I had been looking for a tool to help us find all instances of variables that have been dim'd (declared for you semicolon lovers out there), but never used. Well, VS.NET 2005 helpfully logs all of them as warnings. It also throws warnings for things like having an execution path in your code that exits a function without returning anything (uhhhh, yeah, I just heard about this one, our code never does that...).
Some things I don't like:
* On Windows 2000 in Virtual PC (VPC), the buttons used in the Project Options screen look like they were lifted from Windows 3.1 ;)
* Running two copies of VS.NET 2005 inside VPC under Windows 2000 with only 196 meg allocated, while simultaneously running a DevPartner CodeReview on a 50,000 LOC project on my 'real' desktop makes the system somewhat unresponsive. For the humor impaired, I'm trying to be funny here. I'm amazed it even worked.
The features in Team System look quite yummy as well. Although I can't play with them yet, watch the video on MSDN for a nice (blurry even at 300k) teaser.
We're trying to get our systems to work under VS.NET 2005 so that Paul Vick can make sure that VB 2005 doesn't have the same bug that I bitched about here. The nice benefit is that while I've had a make a separate copy of our code to work with under VS.NET 2005, I can run both on my machine and clean up those warnings so that our code is cleaner today, and ready for VS.NET 2005 when it arrives.
The next year is going to be a long one waiting for this stuff...