On Visual Basic 2005

As many developers I am looking forward to the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2005. Besides the great improvements of the IDE, a new version of the compiler, the new controls and the enhancements of .NET Framework 2.0 are all major steps forward. The stability of the beta release of Visual Basic 2005 surprised me. The Release Candidate I am currently working with, is even much better. It is amazing that so many developers, including the company I am working for, are already developing applications for production environments with this beta product.

One of the best improvements of the IDE is the overall speed. I love code snippets, the smarter intellisense and the snaplines while designing forms. But my favourite improvement of the Visual Basic 2005 IDE is the debugger. First of all 'Edit and Continue' is back, however besides this feature the complete debugging experience is in one word: great! The .NET framework is also enormously expanded. There is much more functionality added in this new version. Well thought, well designed and well tested classes… I love it! With the upcoming release from Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 you also get a bunch of new controls. A few examples: the MenuStrip and a ToolStrip for Office-Style Toolbars, a complete managed WebBrowser control and our lost friend is back, the MaskedTextBox. And I have not even talked about the ease of deployment of your applications.

For me, all these features and enhancements are reasons enough to switch to Visual Basic 2005. It is very interesting to guess which users will be upgrading to the new version of Visual Basic 2005? To be honest, I think that all the current VB.NET 2003 developers will make this step, because their projects can without much hassle opened and compiled in Visual Basic 2005. Also the current knowledge of .NET Framework 1.1 and VB.NET 2003 is not wasted. The developer can concentrate him- or herself on the new functionality and does not have to learn a complete new programming model.
But what about the current Visual Basic 6 developers? I can give them only one advise: make the switch now! It is easier as ever, because there are many resources, many examples and upgrade plans. With the release of VSTO the current VBA developers will also have a very good alternative for building applications for Microsoft Office integration. Actually, I expect that many VB6 developers see the necessity to upgrade now, and that they will make this decision.

With the story of above in mind, as a community leader I am also looking forward to Visual Studio 2005. The past learned me that every new, big release of a development tool will yield many new members. I also think that the friendly priced Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition will help to grown even more.
You and these members makes a community. If you are a novice .NET developer I recommend you to join a developers community. More experienced developers can help you to start programming with these new tools. If you are an professional developer: join these communities too. I encourage you to assist other developers. Helping other people makes you happy and if not…no problem: you've made your fellow developer more happy.

It will be a 'hot' autumn.