MS launches SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio

[Steve]

On Sunday Microsoft launched the latest version of its SQL server, along with a new edition of Visual Studio. It's taken them a long time to get these two pieces of software out of the door, citing security as one reason. eWeek questions whether Visual Studio 2005 was launched too early or too late:

This past weekend, days before Microsoft was set to launch officially its SQL Server 2005/Visual Studio 2005/BizTalk Server 2006 application platform, a number of developers began questioning Visual Studio 2005's ship-worthiness on their blogs.

The Mini-Microsoft blogger "Who da' Punk" kicked things off with the post "Hey Shareholders: VS 2005 Is Fantastic." And the snowball started rolling.

Perhaps not the smoothest product launch, but what's an MS product launch without a bit of drama?

[TiG]

thing is with these type of products, they aren't mass market and follow MS's usual approaches to developer/server applications. Get it out in the field and get people to find the bugs for them.

I've got both installed here for a project and i have to admit it is better than expected, not found too many show stoppers yet

TiG

[eek]

The first one I found was getting SQL server 2005 to run on what had been a poorly setup SQL 2000 box. Simply put it doesn't regardless of what fixes you attempt.

It will work when we go live as I'll splat the box and install everything afresh but it caused 6 hours of pain before we gave up.

VS2005 is nice tho. Granted it ain't perfect but the autosense and debug mode editing make it a worthwhile upgrade.

[TheAnimus]

been using VS2005 since beta 1, i've nothing bad to say against it, other than it liking a fast computer.

[dangel]

VS2005 is nice tho. Granted it ain't perfect but the autosense and debug mode editing make it a worthwhile upgrade.

...or just putting back the features that they broke since Visual Studio 6? I haven't used it in anger yet - it's far too risky to move our software over to a new VS without waiting for proper evaluation first - so I can't say what's improved. Since the last two versions were such heaving piles of crud in terms of number of bugs and things not working like they used to (VS6) i'm somewhat er.. cynical. It's not like VS2003 was actually any good at .NET development (care to talk about the designer?) let alone debugging ("i'm sorry dave, I can't tell you the value of the variable right now", "i'm sorry dave i can't let you edit and continue right now") and I hear a lot of people were asking for another RC pre-release of this one. They've already scheduled a service pack for it - a year off i might add - which would be nice since they seemed to have abandoned fixing problems in the last two versions entirely.

If you're not doing .NET (and thankfully a lot of people still are) then i'd heartily recommend VS6, coupled with the fantastic Visual Assist X from Whole Tomato Software and WndTabs - it's faster (a lot), far more bug free (several service packs available) and coupled with those addins in many ways more flexible. It's also a darn sight cheaper too..

Anyway, fingers crossed it's not got any worse this time round..