Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack

Just thought this was of interest. MS is releasing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta next week.
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualS...ContentID=3311

I wonder if installing the SP1 beta will have any effect on installing SP1 when it goes final..

either way I would take extra care to back up the source code more often if you do apply this beta.

I second kleinma's motion!

Here's my thoughts on it:
Why is there already a need for a service pack?

I think everyone knows that VS 2005 was released well before it was ready. Microsoft had pushed back its release date so many times that they just decided that pushing it back further would hurt their credibility and revenue more than releasing an unstable product. They were right too. We all b*tch and moan about the stability issues but we're all still using it. When this service pack is released we'll have the product that we should have had in the first place, but nearly a year later. If I was told that it could be done over and I could choose to wait another year to get a stable product, I'd still opt for it to be released when it was. It would have been nice if Microsoft could have stuck to their original schedule and had a properly finished when they said they would but, for whatever reason, they didn't. I don't applaud Microsoft for releasing buggy software or falling ridiculously behind their production schedules, but I do applaud them for the features in .NET 2.0 and VS 2005. For all the frustrations of the IDE crashing, I'm glad to have been using it these past ten months. I'm looking forward to the SP dropping so I can enjoy using VS 2005 properly.

I'm just surprised that the service pack took this long to come out. I thought it was already in the works at the time of release of 2005, we're more than a year later now.

I tried the early VS2005 beta, and it had some bugs which I was willing to wait for the fixes.
I dont share that same "blind faith" to start developing with buggy software.
I do understand that these problems require lot's of time, and tunnel vision.
Also, I'm not really using 2005, because of the extra license fee, which is already covered under the more stable 2003 standard version.

Eventually, next year I'll start using 2005 more often as a full product.

Here is Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio .NET 2003

It shows a published date of 8/17/2006

Yes Matt, 2003 finally came out with the SP1 and I am running it with no issues. I wouldalso think that a beta sp is a bad idea as, like you mentioned, will it create issues updating it with the final release of the sp. I surely wouldnt want to gamble on that.

I'm having a slight issue with SP1 for 2003.

First,(saved as file to disk) it took forever to prepare, and install. Each window took several minutes to finish. I assumed that this was because of the large file size.
This may be okay.

Then I rebuilt a project solution, so it was side by side in another folder, separate from the old project build.
The new project build throws the JUST IN TIME COMPILER error for a simple PictureBox.image update, while the old build does not. I've double checked this behaviour between builds.

So now I don't know whick build error is correct, or how it would be fixed in that context. The picture update is trival, so an On error resume next, statement is used, instead of the Try Catch, because the tryCatch causes the JIT exception for no apparent reason. I've seen this problem sometimes in the Microsoft samples for GDI+ManipulateImages, and GDI+Animation.
This seems to be more of a system state problem, which affects things in an unintended way.