Man oh man. I’ve been waiting for today. The day that I could have the finished bits of .NET 2.0.
For the last couple of years I’ve been actively working with Whidbey. Of course Whidbey changed it’s name during the project — becoming Visual Studio 2005. Early in the product cycle I became convinced that Visual Studio 2005, and the accompanying .NET Framework 2.0, are going to be phenomenal products. Giant steps beyond what Microsoft created in .NET 1.x.
I’ve spent days and weeks investigating the new features. Lived through frustrating hours trying to get various Alpha and Beta products to work together. I’ve wrestled with bugs, fought for feature changes, swore at the documentation and generally had a great time learning everything I could about .NET 2.0.
You’d have to have been living in a mine shaft during the last couple years not to been inundated with information about .NET 2.0. Generics, improved data-binding in WinForms and ASP.NET. Partial classes and anonymous methods. Stellar improvements in developer tools and work-flow in Visual Studio 2005. There are so many it’s impossible to list more than a small fraction here. It’s all been a journey to this moment. The golden bits are done and released to the world.
If you’ve got a MSDN subscription then you can download your copy today. If not you’ll have to wait until November 7th to get one. However you do it, get your hands on a copy and start writing code in VB 2005 or C# 2.0 . See the absolutely amazing things that the Windows Forms group and the ASP.NET team have produced. This is a MUST HAVE upgrade.
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I’ve got my copy now. The last bits of SQL Server 2005 just finished trickling onto my hard drive.
It’s time to start building cool new applications. Let’s go.