Is 2005 worth the upgrade?
Some time ago, I read it was really slow.  Is this true?
Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Also, how easy is it to upgrade from 2003 app to 2005?  Does it break
everything in typical, MS "Sorry, that's your problem" style?

Thanks,

Shane

IMHO - Wait for the first service pack.

Of course, that may be in 2008 if it's anything like the priority placed on
VS2003, which is entirely possible since the next latest & greatest
non-backwards-compatible version of VS/DotNet is already in the works.

Bob Lehmann

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I'm a bit torn about this. There are lots of "good" things in VS2005....
though none are truly earth-shattering. I think there's a general lack of
"attention to detail" in all MS products lately. You see it in Visual Studio
2005 as well as Office 2003. It's like their Quality Assurance department
has become one big Unit Testing robot and not human beings with a human
pulse.

VS2005 is *overall* a *bit* slower than V2003.... but it starts up a lot
faster than VS2003. So that's a plus. But, the IDE is buggy and has a "not
quite ready for prime time" feel to it. VS2003 is WAY MORE stable and has a
more polished feel to it. The Web Form designer is the most bug-ridden and
underpowered piece of trash in all of VS. The Visual Studio Team needs to go
down the hall and steal a few folks from the FrontPage team (say what you
want about FrontPage it's WYSIWIG Designer is top notch). It is typical
Microsoft "x.0"... they just can't seem to ever get it right the first time
around EVER. They reinforce their own stereotypes.

Oh yeah, the F1 Help System is pretty attrocious and almost unusable. I find
more info on how to do things using Google than I do using Visual Studio's
Help System and MSDN integration.

I sweark, if they take a huge amount of time to put out a ".1" release I
will JUST ABOUT HAVE HAD IT with MS and their marketing driven development.
Enough is enough. I expect a lot more from MS at this point of time. They
are the only company that pretty much gets away with sitting on BUGS (both
big and minor) for years at a time. We don't pay $$$ thousands of dollars a
year for @#$@ like that.

Having said all that... VS2005 is cool.
Ain't nuthin' else out there like it... Bugs and lack of attention-to-detail
notwithstanding.

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Hi,

Thank you, CMM for that detailed analysis.

I would love to hear more comments from other users out there. I am
myself wondering whether it is time to upgrade...

How about some information on this ?

Thanks and regards,

Cerebrus.

Not so much with Windows Forms. But the ASP.NET project model is radically
different and I have run into MANY headaches "upgrading" a large complicated
ASP.NET application. For instance, some of your generic modules get moved to
an App.Code folder but then you can't reference them in the same way because
the "Upgrade" process introduced all these nested Namespace hierarchies
which throw everything off. It's stupid and needlessly complex.

But, all in all, it doesn't "break everything." It's just a little annoying
here and there. Some things were definately not *thought through* but seemed
to have been thrown in as a "gee-whiz" marketing thing. For instance, Code
Snippets are cool, but there's no way to edit them (without a 3rd party or
aftermarket tool). They hide the old DataAdapters from the Toolbox, stress
the new "TableAdapter" but don't consider what that means to CODE SEPARATION
and TRUE n-tier (physical) applications.

My opinion: I hate to pin out one person.... and from what I know he's a
nice guy.... but Soma Somasgar, I think is hugely responsible for the
DECLINE of *quality* in MS's developer tools.

I've been running 2003 and 2005 side-by-side for a few months now - using
2003 for web projects, 2005 for winforms. Actually, reason for this is
probably bcos I haven't had any major web apps to develop recently (and am
familiar with everything on that side in 2003, so haven't had the need to
change yet).
As far as comparing the 2 goes, I can agree with  CMM on this - 2003,
although painfully slow to start up, was definately more stable. There are
some fairly big bugs that I've run into, such as the Edit and Continue
(H8013141e) one - not good but is fixed now.
I think that the Help system works great, msot of the time, and there's
definately been an improvement in the amount of info there (compared to the
matching stuff in MSDN online, which has got worse! or is that just in
Firefox?!)

However, what has definately been the most useful addition to 2005 is
Generics. Have saved so, so much repetitive code.

There's loads more I could go on about, but in conclusion I would say wait
till SP1 is out. It would be a shame to be put off a great product because of
the bugs that are in it at the moment!

Richard
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IIRC SPs for VS.NET 2003 and VS 2005 will be released this year.

Q2 and Q3 respectively:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/servicing/default.aspx

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God. Almost a whole year before a patch. Sheesh! Man, only MS could get away
with that.

I think MS needs to downsize... the Law of Diminishing Returns has hit them
hard.

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That's not bad when you consider the VS.NET 2003 case ;-)

True... though I thought VS2003 was pretty darn solid. Maybe it's because I
went from VB6 to VS2003 so I had nothing to compare it to.

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