vs.net 2005 express beta

I just downloaded the Visual C# 2005 Express Beta a few hours ago, and I have to say that I'm impressed. There are features in there that over the past 6 months could have saved me days, if not whole weeks. I'm finding that if we ever do convert our projects over to this version, we'll have lots to do to start making our app take advantage of the new features, but in my opinion, it would be well worth it. Besides, everyone needs to refactor now and again, right?

One of the more talked about features that I think actually lives up to the hype is the auto-expansion features that have been added to Intellisense. One of my most despised programming tasks is creating properties for private member variables. This is perhaps one of the more tedious things that I have to do on a day-to-day basis. With 2005, I simply type in "prop", hit the tab key, and then I get to fill in the blanks to create a property. Wow. It's just that simple. And there's plenty of other timesavers like this in there too.

Thank God they finally saw fit to include a proper webbrowser control as well. That old COM interop stuff was just garbage; it worked about half the time, and you were always wondering when your form layout would get hosed just because you wanted a web browser on it. The flow/grid layout panels are also a welcome feature.

Finally, I have to say that my favorite feature so far is something I haven't heard a lot of talk about. That's the ability to add a settings file to your project. It's a very simple concept, but if we'd had this one feature six months ago, we would've saved ourselves a few headaches. You can add a settings file to any project, and specify whether each setting should be scoped at the application or the user level. It took us a week to figure out our settings object and learn enough about Serialization in .NET to make things work the way we wanted them to. C'est la vie. At least we learned a lot during our time creating our settings object, so the time spent was not all for naught.

There's lots of other things that are really cool too; far too many to name here. There's also some things I hope they get fixed before these are out of beta as well (most notably the moving of panels; what moron thought to only allow moving by clicking the box in the top left corner?). At any rate, I can see I've got a lot to learn about the Framework changes that are coming down the pipe. Maybe this time I'll be on top of the changes rather than learning about them two years late!

[Listening to: Playstation 2 - Excelsior (Gaming FM - Modern Console) - Dead Or Alive 2 - ]