Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack(s) 1

 

As an early Christmas present, Microsoft released a welcome service pack for Visual Studio 2005 last week. There's downloads available for each appropriate edition including the team foundation server. Check the download pages for releases notes as well.

There is still another service pack/update in the wings to provider greater facilities for integration with Windows Vista. It is supposed to be available in the first quarter of 2007, but you can download the beta of that service pack now.

For sometime now, I've done almost all of my development exclusively in virtual machines such as VPC and VMWare. This has been the only sane way to minimize disruption with the transition from Windows XP to Vista on my primary notebook.

As an aside, I heard a rumour that the VMWare Workstation 6.0 beta now supports the option to run your IDE on your host OS, and then to deploy, run & debug inside a virtual machine. That is certainly going to open some interesting scenarios. I can see that being very helpful for automated unit testing on via a build server, testing out on multiple configurations, environments, operating systems, etc.