The Lanham Factor

.NET 2.0 is sooo boring they started hyping .NET 3.0 to get some attention.

I'll pass.

Are you going to pass and stay with VS.NET 2K3 _OR_ are you going to switch to another product like, say, Eclipse 3.1?

For me .NET 2.0 is just an expansion of the foundation classes which is way overdue, such as System.Security.AccessControl. There are some other cool things such as generics, UI controls, and improved Interoperability (really fixes).

Seeing that you are experiences with SharePoint, aren't there some improvements included in ASP.NET 2.0 for the Web Part stuff?

Check out my blog on SharpDevlop 2.0. It seems like a cool solution for Win development. It won't help you too much with ASP.NET 2.0.

It definitely has some cool features, and Team Systems is really nice, but I'm almost feel they are trying to cram in too much, and I do feel they didn't think through a number of things.

The visual designers are very nice, but it's not UML - it's close, in some aspects - and yes, easier for someone who doesn't know UML to depict a class diagram or component diagram, but as always Microsoft deviates from the standards and I think this will cause spirited debates in time to come and who knows what else. I mean, heck we already have enough people that think a use case is a diagram with stick figures and circles - let's feed on that mentallity of 'look at the pretty pictures'...

Managing requirements with Team System? Well it's a nice feature, and I stress 'feature'. There are several requirements management tools out there already, and the fact that Microsoft is using a 3rd party (in portion) to accomplish this just emphasizes maybe they should leave that alone for now. I've played around with it some, and to be honest I find it very blasey for Microsoft. The fact that the big selling point (at least that I've seen) on it is that it can export to Share Point (via Excel and Word) for non-VS users isn't much of a selling point to enterprises who don't use Share Point, or don't fully utilize it.

Also, I'm leary of some of the new classes they've added in VS2005 - take for instance their DataProvider Factory that has no associated Creator class'. One quick look at GoF classic will stress the reasons why you have a seperated abstract and concrete Creator class from the abstract and concrete Factory class...you don't create a Factory (soley) by a CreateInstance static FIELD placed in the concrete class...at the very least that should be a method!

Another example of great fore thought is the MembershipProvider class' - which by default looks for SQLExpress and will build the database if necessary. Um...that doesn't work on a shared host very well. Also, want to build you're own? Better be able to 'register' it on where you're deploying it to, otherwise you'll get a run time error - again, something that doesn't work too well on a shared host.

As far as Enterpise Library and it's predecessors - they're bloated crap! I can expand on that if you'd like but as an example of one of the many issues I've found with it try running the ErrorHandling block on a shared host - guess what you get - it trys to register itself in the registry - why, WHY, <b>OH WHYYYYY</b>, would you make a component do this in today's modern world? It's this is the kind of logic that I've been discovering more of in VS2005 and what has been scaring me.

I do think VS2005 has some great features over VS2003, but I think this is a case where they should've left well enough alone for a few more years - 2 years is too soon to put out a new product of this size in my opinion, and I think it shows in the details such as those that I've point out.

And .NET 3.0? Start a thread on that BDogg and then you'll REALLY see me rant! :)

Thanks, Brian, for the great feedback! I appreciate your details as well as your overall perspective! Keep the feedback coming.

As an aside, I think you have a lot of good information to share. Consider getting a blog! In the mean time, keep your great feedback coming!

B

what about the sluggish IDE? it's real slow compared with vs2003. i'm not a big fan of asp.net 2.0 either, it just piled on loads of extraneous stuff.