After a very long product cycle, Visual Studio 2005 released to manufacturing today. This is an awesome release that includes a lot of great new functionality. Great job, Developer Division!
The ISO files can be downloaded via MSDN Subscriber Downloads. If you want to know which versions are offered at different subscription levels, check out MSDN Subscriptions for Visual Studio 2005. The Professional Edition ISO is a 2760MB download, and if your subscription level offers it, the Team Suite ISO is 3630MB. If you'd like to know the features that accompany each SKU, the Visual Studio 2005 Product Line Overview should help.
Also, the various flavors of the .NET Framework 2.0 SDKs and Redistributables are available via the Microsoft Download Center.
For those who don't have MSDN Subscriptions, the Express Editions of of Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual Web Developer, Visual J#, and SQL Server will be made publicly available on the Microsoft Download Center on November 7th. You should also be able to find the full boxed product in stores that same day.
If you have a pre-release version of Visual Studio 2005 installed on your machine, please be sure to follow the Pre-RTM Uninstall Instructions. This post by Aaron Stebner does a great job of outlining all of the potential issues.
And, since I've already been asked a few times today, here's a page in the MSDN Library that discusses Installing Visual Studio Versions Side-by-Side. The short answer is that "Visual Studio supports installation of Visual Studio 6.0, Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003, and Visual Studio 2005 on the same computer."
By the way, although I haven't posted about it yet on this blog, I am hiring a Technical Evangelist to focus on the next version of Visual Studio, code name "Orcas." If you're passionate about our developer tools and think you might be interested, please contact me.
Here is another set of macro photographs that have been formatted for a 16:10 aspect ratio (1920 x 1200) to match my widescreen monitor. So that they'll work with more "traditional" resolutions, I've also included links to 4:3 versions (1600 x 1200). As you can probably tell from the thumbnails below, these are images of fall. They were all taken with a Nikon 5700 in macro mode. I purchased a Canon Rebel XT a couple of months ago, but I have yet to pick up a macro lens.
The first three photos were taken this past weekend at a park in Redmond, Washington. I don't recall exactly where the other two were taken, but it was somewhere near Holland, Michigan.
You can get the first six sets here: Macro Wallpaper, Macro Wallpaper 2, Macro Wallpaper 3: Fallpaper, Macro Wallpaper 4, Macro Wallpaper 5, Macro Wallpaper 6.
Thanks to Marcelo for pointing out the recently established fontblog. There are already a number of informative posts that are worth checking out. Although the four minute TrueType hinting video is old, the technology is still interesting. If you'd like to know how ClearType achieves its magic, I'd recommend the ClearType Information page on our Microsoft Typography site. Be sure to run the web-based ClearType Tuner or the Windows XP PowerToy version.
And while I'm talking about fonts, it's worth mentioning the Poynter Online article, The Next Big Thing in Online Type, about the upcoming fonts that will ship with Windows Vista.
Via our friends at ActiveWin, a recently posted episode of MSDN TV features Mark Boulter and Mike Harsh giving an overview of "Cider," the visual designer for Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code-named "Avalon") that will be part of a future version of Visual Studio. The 13-minute presentation includes a 10-minute demo where Mike shows the creation of a small media application within Visual Studio that is then opened and styled in "Sparkle" Interactive Designer that is subsequently round-tripped back into Visual Studio for final coding. Imagine what can be created when the workflow between a professional designer and an application developer is this seamless. I can hardly wait!
This short demonstration also features early work by Infragistics on the NetAdvantage DataPresenter control that they showed at PDC05. It's an amazing control, and I encourage you to try it out. Or, if you'd rather just watch a video of what can be quickly created with the control, check out their Show Off video submission.
There's also a 43-minute Channel 9 interview with Mark Boulter and Brian Pepin where they talk more about and demonstrate the "Cider" and "Sparkle" tools. If you're still craving more (and what hungry developer wouldn't?), there are a number of PDC05 sessions that should interest you; specifically: TLN213, TLN319, TLNL03, and TLNL10.
A friend of mine pointed me to Microsoft U.K.'s very innovative WSYP Project. As someone who works closely with early adopters of our technology, I'm all for increasing the connection between our customers and the product team...especially, the individual developer. So, if you've ever wondered what happens when you press the Send Error Report button after an application failure, you need to watch the four minute video. And I need to check my chair tomorrow morning. :-)
On a more serious note, if you are curious about Windows Error Reporting (WER), I encourage you to read How Windows Error Reporting Works. Until I learned how much we rely on this data, I used to ignore this dialog box. Now, however, I make a point of sending an error report each time.