In case you missed it, Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 along with the .NET Framework 3.5 is out.

Scott Guthrie has a great overview of the changes and how to get it.  If you don’t want to travel all the way to Scott’s site, you can find the installation versions of VS 2008 here.

My favorite way to check out versions of Visual Studio or any major beta software for that matter is through a pre-built VPC.  I have found them over here.  You have to download 8 files (2 executables and 6 .rar files), you run one of the executables and it creates a nice VPC you can use with with Virtual PC or Virtual Server.  It certainly makes a lot less work by not having to install all of this software and it also keeps my system clean.

I downloaded all the files, ran the executable and had my VPC up and running in only a few minutes (after the long downloads but who cares). 

I am anxious to try out the new Multi-platform target support and Intellisense with JavaScript.

Version 1.1 of Ruby in Steel has been released.  This is a Ruby development environment that is an add-in to Visual Studio 2005 and becomes an integral part of the environment.  I live in Visual Studio much of my day and being able to create Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications within Visual Studio is really nice.

I have blogged about Ruby in Steel recently and have been using the tool for a while now and really happy with it.  I am also very happy with their support as well.

I can’t say enough good things about how nice this environment makes life so nice for someone who primarily focuses on Visual Studio development but wants to do some Ruby and Rails development and get up-to-speed quickly.  The integration with all the nice Rails-ish tools like Gem, Rake and Capistrano is a huge bonus.

I know it has been a while since I have posted here but I have been very busy with a slight change in my work.? I have left my architect position at All Star Incentive Marketing and decided to go out and give consulting a try again.? I had done consulting for a while until the dotcom bust and took a permanent employee position. I have been working on a large contract with Pfizer and some other smaller ones since my last post.? I plan to start blogging again on a more regular basis after the first of the year. Anyway, the point of my post is the release of Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005.? Unless you have been living under a rock you have heard of the release from Microsoft a short time ago.?? I have been waiting for this release for a while now with the hopes of fixing some of the annoying performance problems and other bugs hanging around.? The download is a whopping 431mb, which is a BIG service pack. Installation Installing the service pack went very well with a few things you need to be aware of prior to installing, such as:

• Uninstalling Web Application Projects, if installed.? The service pack will install a new version of this application.
• A large amount of disk space is needed, upwards of around 2G free.
• A large amount of time – the service pack takes more time to install than the original Visual Studio install.? The service pack will install once for each flavor of Visual Studio 2005 you have installed.

All-in-all the installation went very well but did take a long time.? I suggest doing it at the end of the day or some other downtime. Scott Guthrie has some pieces of advice on his web site about the installation which is worth checking out.

Roland Weigelt released an updated version of his product called GhostDoc.  If you haven't used this product it is a Visual Studio 2005 add-in which makes quick work of a meanial task in VS, documenting method headers. I have been using GhostDoc since the VS 2003 release (1.3) and have been happy with the simple ability to take care of an important task for me.   Check it out, it's well worth the effort.  Technorati Tags : GhostDoc, Visual Studio 2005

Just a quick note for those lazy as I am.  Roland Weigelt’s GhostDoc for Visual Studio 2005 and 2003 is a real time saver.  In short it installs as an add-in for Visual Studio and will add XML documentation to your methods in your code. 

It is very customizable and just works.  If you find it teadious to always have to write documentation for your methods as I do you should check it out.  It is as easy as a right mouse click and choose "Document This" in your code and done.  It also rewrites documentation for methods whose parameters have change.

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2005, GhostDoc

An interesting problem one of my fellow developers faced recently was losing Intellisense in Visual Studio 2003.  The interesting problem was Intellisense only was lost on web forms and in user controls and only for form objects like buttons and labels.

Since Intellisense knew nothing about our controls such as buttons, it would stand to reason that Visual Studio knew nothing about them at all.  This proved true when our events assigned in the OnInit() method kept disappearing.  When a button, for example, is added to a web form and the OnClick() event is implemented but later removed also removes the events subscription in OnInit().  We were losing our events so this told us Visual Studio knew nothing of our controls.

The problems didn’t happen all at once and where not very consistent either and got progressively worse.  We started by looking at the forms on the problem system and looking at the very same form on two different systems without any Intellisense problems, the form controls came up in Intellisense just fine.  This tells us it’s the system and not a code-related problem.

I have had minor issues with Intellisense losing reference to various objects in the past, but a simple closing the solution and reloading normally fixed the issues.  In extreme cases, closing Visual Studio was required but nothing more.   This approach did not fix our problems.

Our next step was to delete all of the files in the ASP.NET Cache located in C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\Temporary ASP.NET Files.  This is the location temporary files such as assemblies are copied.  After deleting these files we performed an IISReset to make sure IIS had a fresh start.  Trying Intellisense again in our project resulted in the same problems. 

We also use various add-ins and third-party components.  Deciding to remove all of these, trying Intellisense again, reinstalling and other such things did not work. 

We decided to give Microsoft a call and use one of our MSDN Universal incidents.  The call turned out to be worth the effort to learn this occurs in Visual Studio 2003 more often than I would expect.  In order to fix the problem we had to perform the following steps:

1. Delete all files in the applications \bin directory (we had already done this)
2. Delete all files and directories in the C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\Temporary ASP.NET Files directory (we had already done this)
3. Delete all files in the VSWebCache.  (we hadn’t tried this).  This directory is normally located in your documents and settings such as this – C:\Documents and Settings\rbazinet\VSWebCache.
4. Perform an IISReset

I was not even aware Visual Studio cached anything under my profile.  Well, after the IISReset and restarting Visual Studio and reloading the project, Intellisense had returned to it’s normal self. 

Wow, what a way to fix a problem that should not be a problem in the first place.  I would expect this to be a bug fixed in Visual Studio but there doesn’t seem to be a hotfix available.  Let’s hope this is not an issue in Visual Studio 2005.

Technorati Tags : ASP.NET, Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft

Unless you are living under a rock you are probably aware that Microsoft released Visual Studio 2005 today in conjunction with SQL Server 2005 and Biztalk Server 2006.  This is a release that has been a long time coming and many of us .NET developers have been waiting for.  I have been working with VS 2005 since pre-beta1 and it is huge improvement over VS 2003.

Also annouced today, Microsoft will be giving away the Express Editions of VS 2005 for the period of one year.  These are the editions that will be low cost in the $80-$100 range.

It seems on the heels of this announcement that Microsoft has plans for a service pack for the VS2005 release as well as a much overdue one for VS2003.  The announcement was made by a Microsoft C# product manager, so it seem official.

Yet another release today from Microsoft is the Web Services Enhancements 3.0, which is the much anticipated add-on to VS2005 to help create secure web services under .NET 2.0.

There are probably some tidbits I missed, I will update if I hear about any additional releases of interest.

Dan Fernandez pointed out in his blog about a tool from Microsoft to do an Automatic Uninstall of the pre-RTM bits of VS2005.  It’s unsupported but will probably be better than going through the mound of steps required to perform before doing other VS2005 updates.

Also released today on the MSDN site is RTM versions of SQL Server 2005 and the .NET 2.0 Runtime.

I noted earlier I had tried to get to the MSDN site and had no luck downloading VS2005.  I noticed in my first try the only downloads available were ISO of CD’s but returning to the site later should DVD ISO’s instead, which I was able to download on the first try.  3.6G but on my 4MB cable connection it didn’t take long.

I noticed while on the MSDN site that there are several flavors of VS2005 available:

• Visual Studio 2005 Standard
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional
• Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Software Developers

Well, the title says it all.  Finally we have access to Visual Studio 2005 via MSDN Subscriber downloads.  I have been trying for a while now and the MSDN servers seem to be overworked a bit.  I guess I will have to try later.

The announcement from Somasegar’s WebLog. 

I picked up this post from Jeffrey Palermo, it appears the Visual Studio 2005 RTM will be available to MSDN Universal subscribers.  I haven’t seen an official Microsoft announcement yet but it’s still something to keep a watch out for.