Yesterday I went to a local .NET developers association meeting. It was on the upcoming VS 2005, .NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005 and Team Server. An interesting event, although too short to cover such wide topics in detail. Most of the time presenter just scratched the surface. Often he just told the viewers that a new feature exists but he doesn’t have enough time to go into it and moved on.

There was a short demo of ASP.NET 2.0. New features are cool, but I still don’t think it’s simple enough. It’s just too easy to screw up and make the project too complex and hard to maintain.

Another demo was on new VS 2005 development tools (I really liked automatic diagrams to see class relationships). New debugger is much better and makes code analyzes much easier. There's also a new edit and continue feature for C# developers. New Visual Studio looks like a much better platform for code writing and provides a lot of functionality that was either absent or offered by third parties as plug-ins for VS 2003.

In the end, though, I haven’t learned a lot. It was fun to see it in action, but I’ve been following where .NET is going to and there were no real surprises. The most informative part of the presentation was at the very end when people started to discuss problems they have encountered when they tried to install and work with the new tools. Basically VS 2005 Beta 2 and .NET 2.0 can be installed side-by-side with the old versions, but SQL 2005 doesn’t like to sit on the same machine as SQL 2000. I’d recommend not installing new and old SQL servers as apparently Enterprise Manager gets really %#@) up. If you still decide to do it, I would strongly encourage you to look up more information online.