So today I decided it was going to be a beta day, well really, I was just going to work in VS.NET 2005’s Nov. CTP distro that was just launched, more on this later. However, prior to lunch I got an email notifying me that I’ve been accepted into the FogBugz 4.0 beta program. Ohh yeah! Now, I’m going to keep Joel’s “Mouth Wide Shut” policy by not discussing anyting about the 4.0 beta, but I do have to say this – its stable, more powerful, and a bunch of new awesome features have been added.

With that said, its time to move onto VS.NET 2005. Wow, this thing gets better and better with each new CTP or beta that is released. I’ve spent some time just working with web apps right now, you know the basics. The one feature that was lacking in the current versions of VS.NET that I now LOVE in VS.NET 2005 is the fact that you have intellisense for custom controls – and without doing anything! By simply adding your Register directive or using the new global Registration for controls, you’ll immediately start seeing intellisense for your custom controls. You don’t realize how many times I as a web control author, have been asked “how come this doesn’t have any intellisense?” I’m also still getting used to the idea of no precompilation of web apps anymore, however I did see that you can “publish” precompiled apps to a location that will allow you to deploy those handy-dandy assemblies instead of source code.

I did notice one bug, and I’ve not read the release notes yet, but the ASP.NET configuration manager doesn’t work – at least not logged on as an admin (still haven’t tried as an admin yet). Also, I’m finally glad that binding data using the ObjectDataSource finally works…thats going to make binding to business objects soooo much easier. Wow, I’m still amazed, now – back to more playing / testing!