Microsoft has released the first of several products that were caught up in an impressively long gestation period. We’re still waiting for Vista and Office 12, but at least Visual Studio 2005 has arrived. Confusingly enough, Visual Studio 2005 comes in five broad flavours. (Microsoft says this is intended to make the pricing accessible to small businesses.) In essence, Visual Studio Professional 2005 can be seen as the standard version, with Visual Studio Standard 2005 being a streamlined edition supplying basic development tools. (Both support Visual Basic, C#, J#, mobile device development and database design tools; Professional adds Crystal Reports and SQL Server Reporting Services.) Visual Studio Tools for Office is the ‘professional’ edition and includes support for Excel 2003, Word 2003 and InfoPath 2003. Visual Studio Team System contains features of Visual Studio Professional 2005, plus Excel, Word and InfoPath support, and is aimed at supporting the entire development lifecycle. And finally, there are various lightweight Express versions aimed at novice developers; Microsoft supplies details of these at lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/.

IDE
Visual Studio, long held to be one of the best Integrated Development Environments around, now has support for writing applications in more than 30 languages. The new iteration supplies version 2 of .NET Framework, Microsoft’s answer to the Java Enterprise System, and this now enables the creation of managed custom objects – in other words, true object-oriented database development – by integrating Visual Studio with SQL Server 2005. Other enhancements to .NET Framework 2.0 include general performance improvements, new language features and better support for Web services.

Visual Studio Professional 2005 also comes with ASP.NET 2.0, and the main emphasis here is increasing developer productivity and enhancing application performance. Both .NET Framework 2 and ASP.NET 2.0 are required to work with Visual Studio Professional 2005; fortunately, the product will install them for you. There are far too many changes in Visual Studio Professional 2005 to list exhaustively. Many of these are concerned with making the program run more smoothly and improving the interface or performance. For example, the Start Page is better organised and code windows and form designers display as tabbed documents within the IDE. Also, you can now export IDE settings as a file in order to import them on new installations. Even better, the IDE saves Auto-Recover information at intervals so a crash isn’t so disastrous.

However, many improvements directly impact on code editing and general programming tasks. Never has restructuring code or changing its semantics been easier: call up the Refactor menu while using the Editor and you can use a wealth of options to rename, extract, encapsulate and restructure application code. The program aims to save you time and effort, so, for instance, when you rename a variable, parameter or class, it will replace all code instances with the new name. Having said this, the level of refactoring support depends on the language used, with C# having the lion’s share.

Another notable new feature is code snippets. This provides a library of small code sections for use in projects; if you need a routine, you should find a suitable one here. You can create your own snippets, distribute them and even download new ones. VB 6 developers will be delighted to see that Edit and Continue has made a welcome return; this speeds up debugging by enabling users to stop applications at an error, repair the code and run the amended code. More prosaically, the Intellisense feature makes suggestions to code as you type; it’s amazing how often these are useful.

Forms
If you develop Windows Forms applications, you’ll also notice some welcome changes. There’s more help with laying out forms and more controls. It’s the attention to making things easier for the developer that strikes you: for instance, .NET Framework 2 controls display Snap Lines for neater control alignment. The Visual Studio Professional 2005 IDE is certainly exceptional and it should make you more productive almost instantly. The language and platform support is perhaps the program’s strongest feature, with VB.NET, .NET Framework and C# being on an almost equal footing. Visual Studio Professional 2005 should be indispensable for anyone developing for Windows, Windows Mobile or Microsoft Internet Information Services.