Well, unless you've been living under a rock, you know that we finally signed off on VS 2005 and that it's available now (or soon) to MSDN subscribers.  The "boxed" versions should be coming in just a few weeks, and i can't wait to see what you think about it.  I was involved in many parts of the VS2005 release, including:

  1. Working heavily on the C# IDE experience.   Primarily IntelliSense, but also in a myriad of other design time components
  2. Working some on the C# compiler.
  3. Working on creating the C# Express SKU.  I was heavily involved in piecing things together and helping with componentization so that we could sculpt vs into the lean and mean app that is C# express

So this is a huge release for me.  I wasn't involved with 2k3 and so i don't really feel strongly about that tool.  But with 2k5 you're going to be using my code (potentially for hours upoin hours every day) and that's a huge thing for me.  I'm feeling a rush of emotions right now like you wouldn't believe.  Tons of excitement, but also a lot of fear.  Will you guys like what we've done?  Will you *love* it?  Will i be the one who introduced a bug that you're going to be cursing out for months?  Who knows?!

Now, with teh release of Whidbey i can start setting my sites on Orcas.  As you've probably been able to tell, i've taken on a position of helping to craft what will eventually become the C# 3.0 language.  It's my hope that as you all start using 2.0 day in and day out you can then work with us (and us with you) on trying to make 3.0 awesome.   Toward that goal i've already tried to be intimitely involved in the prototyping we've been doing.  If you're tried out the Beta2 preview then you're using code that i was actively involved with creating.  I'd like to talk about that a lot more at some point, but that will have to wait.  But for now, i wanted to let you know that we've updated the Linq preview bits to work with the RTM version of VS2005.  You can find the download for that on the linq page here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/future/linq/

I'm going to be very clear here: Do not run these bits on Beta2.  And do not run the Beta2 bits on RTM.  There were binary breaking changes and things will crash almost immediately :-)

Normally we'd try to detect something like that so we could at least give a useful message to the user.  However, since 99% of our energy was focussed on Whidbey we simply couldn't spare the time for such niceties.

Anyways, i hope you can get this stuff soon.  And when you do, let me know what you think!