Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta experiences

Like most people I’ve run into my fair share of oddities and problems in Visual Studio 2005 including the dreaded VB compiler dying a death on reasonable-sized projects so I jumped at the chance to get my hands on the beta of SP1.

There are several versions of the service pack including one for Visual Studio 2005, one for each of the Express editions and one for the Team Foundation Server. My experiences here are with the 350MB SP1 beta for Visual Studio 2005.

Installer

The first major gripe is with the installer itself. It’s slow, it needs 2.5GB of free space to apply the SP and it doesn’t tell you to uninstall Web Application Projects until several minutes in so make sure you:

1. Don’t need to use Visual Studio 2005 for about 25 minutes
2. Have uninstalled Web Application Projects (you can keep Web Deployment Projects tho)
3. Have over 2.5GB of free space once the installer is on your system

If you’re short of disk space you could try turning on the Compress contents option on c:\windows\installer if you don’t mind waiting a little longer.

What’s New?

Web Application Projects are now built in!

What’s Fixed?

The list of fixes is quite comprehensive although many of the KB articles state ‘Info Not Yet Available’. It also includes all the previous hot-fixes to VS2005 (many of which are available on request only).

There are some interesting ones regarding performance of large C++ and VB.NET projects/solutions.

Interested?

If you feel like giving it a shot head over to to MS Connect and grab it but be quick, the beta ends October 31st. The beta is available in English and Japanese only.

[)amien