After a long silence - what has the guy been doing recently - Scott Guthrie has posted a great Whidbey/ASP.NET 2.0/Visual Web Developer update which gives an excellent insight into the behaviour of a large development team approaching a major milestone. In this case the milestone is Beta2.
Check it out.
Tim Sneath has posted a very good summary on the new WinForms controls and improvements in Whidbey, including some notes about migration from 1.0 to 2.0.
Study it carefully, Obi-Wan. I will be testing you on it later.
From the stream of TechEd announcements, two things you undoubtedly already know: Visual Studio 2005 beta 1 is ready for MSDN subscribers to download, and Microsoft has launched the Visual Studio Express range. Why am I telling you? Because I have nothing else to blog about today.
There's been plenty said about VS2k5 and I have nothing of value to add. However, I think the Express products merit attention.
The Express range is squarely targeted at coding newbies who want to get into building winforms or web apps. This is particularly interesting for me, as I often get asked by colleagues not working in the IT team how to get into the IT industry. I suppose I make the job seem easy to them or something. Anyhow, the Express range looks like a good place to start.
Visual Studio Express betas are free of charge and the FAQ says that the full product pricing will not be announced until 2005. Apparently the products will be 'low-cost and...easy to acquire'. Smart. Making them hard to find or impossible to download might be off-putting for a coding tyro.
Also noteworthy is SQL Server 2005 Express Edition - this is actually a replacement for the MSDE and uses the core SQL Server 2005 engine. The 'limits' on 2005 Express are a little different to the old MSDE. It only supports one CPU, but you can bung it onto a multiprocessor box, and it can supports a mere 1GB addressable RAM and 4GB database size. Sigh...I won't be able to implement that Enterprise-wide high-throughput mission-critical system with it. How frustrating.