Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 and the beta for VS2005 SP1 Vista Update.

Service Pack 1 addresses issues that were found through a combination of customers and partner feedback, as well as internal testing.   The issues addressed range in severity from places where the syntax coloring was incorrect to customer reported crashes in various scenarios.  In some areas, more than 50% of the bugs addressed were reported by customers through the MSDN Product Feedback Center.  Overall, Service Pack 1 offers customers improvements in responsiveness, stability and performance for Visual Studio 2005.

Service Pack 1 not only addresses issues feedback through both community and internal testing but also adds over 70 improvements for common development scenarios including:

• New processor support (e.g. Core Duo) for code generation and profiling
• Performance and scale improvements in Team Foundation Server
• Team Foundation Server integration with Excel 2007 and Project 2007
• Tool support for occasionally connected devices and SQL Server Compact Edition
• Additional support for project file based web applications
• Windows Embedded 6.0 platform and tools support

You can also find further technical descriptions of some of the fixes included in this service pack on the Visual Studio Developer Center.

For developers using Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista, Microsoft is in currently in development on an update to Service Pack 1 called the ‘Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Vista Update Beta’. This update builds on the improvements made in SP1 and delivers a first class experience for developers wanting to take advantages of the new features in Windows Vista. The Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista is expected to ship after the consumer availability of Windows Vista in Q1 of 2007 and is now available in beta.

Both VS2005 SP1 and VS2005 SP1 Vista Update beta can be downloaded from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/VS2005SP1