There’s a new episode of The .NET Show that is an Introduction to Visual Studio 2005. From the summary:
In this episode we talk with Jason Zander and Amnon Horowitz about the important improvements that have been added not only to Visual Studio 2005, but also to ASP.NET and the .NET Framework (v2.0) as well. Later, Rick LaPlante and Shanku Niyogi give us some hands-on examples of how these improvements can aid in the productivity of developing various styles of applications.
We’ve published a Knowledge Base article about known applications that are affected by the recently released Windows XP Service Pack 2. KB article 842242 contains all of the details. Most of the applications and games on the list need to have some ports manually opened on the new Windows Firewall. Although this may seem like a bad thing, this is actually a good thing, since the firewall is successfully blocking unknown incoming connections…the desired behavior for a secure system.
Steve McConnell, of Construx, is responsible for one of my (and many others) top 10 developer books, Code Complete, Second Edition. MSDN TV interviews Steve in this half-hour episode and talks about “updates in the recently published second version, software process, agile development, and more.”
As expected, MSDN subscribers (sorry…not sure which subscriber levels) can now download the Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Refresh from the MSDN Subscriber Downloads site. The Refresh is the same as the previous beta release, but it also includes a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Visual Studio 2005 Team System. The DVD ISO weighs in at 3.39GB.
Update: Rob Caron's blog entry provides more details about what to download in addition to the VS.NET 2005 ISO.
Update #2: Darren Jefford's blog entry provides some useful installation details.
Brad Abrams points out Arena Wars, a game written using managed code. Based on some of the comments on his site, it sounds like it’s worth taking a look at the downloadable demo. Has anyone else had a chance to investigate this? With most of the heavy lifting being done by high-performance GPUs these days, managed code starts to make a lot of sense.
Related to my recent post about experimenting with Direct3D and C#, Brandon Furtwangler looks like he’s been busy with his own experimentation. Nice stuff, Brandon!