Lots of Fun Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Stuff

MSDN shipped their part of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 at about 12:30am on Tuesday morning. Sara has a nice summary of the new MSDN Product Feedback Center that I think folks will find particularly satisfying:

"At the MSDN Product Feedback Center, you can submit bugs and suggestions. You can search through other people’s submitted bugs and suggestions. You can vote for your favorites. You can share workarounds. And, you can see feedback and details directly from folks on our product teams. Oh, and you can get notified when the status of an issue you’re interested in changes."

In other words, developer feedback to the product teams for the supported products is no longer just an email or a post, but an entry in a database that the product team and you can track. I can't wait to get this for Longhorn.

Also, Kent has announced the new Visual Studio 2005 Developer Center, complete with next-gen personalization features that we're testing on this content before we push them out site-wide. My favorite part of the site is the bit where the product teams that contribute to .NET 2.0 point out what's new (and the Windows Forms team even tell you how they're progressing on the features they're implementing).

Kent also points out the site for the new Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition, the beta of a slim and trim VS05 for students, hobbyists, etc. that you can download immediately. There's even a contest for Express users where the prizes include an XBox and a copy of Halo 2.

Duncan also has a post where he addresses our current philosophy on coverage of shipping vs. future content on MSDN and why TechEd is going to throw it "out of whack" for a while (except me, of course, who's going to be out of whack for a good long time : ).

NOTE: Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 will not install on Longhorn. Hopefully the next community drop of Longhorn will include a matching drop of VS05, but as of today, they remain incompatible.