Visual Studio 2005 Launch event
The MSDN launch event for Visual Studio 2005 was not as useful as the one for SQL Server 2005. The speaker was curiously running a beta version of the software (whose final release was given out for free at the end of the event). Several times during the presentation, a wizard wouldn't work, and at one point, the IDE crashed completely. Aside from this, she concentrated on web technologies, without even touching the 2.0 .NET Framework and discussing how the IDE plays with the new Managed C++ language. Perhaps there was some miscommunication with respect to the purpose of the event.
Visual Studio 2005 introduces "Distributed System Designers" that allow the user to provide a top-level view of their solution, then drill down to implement databases, web applications, and such. A new source control system is available, that has integrated unit testing as part of the check-in process. SQL Server has .NET CLR support disabled by default; but when enabled, the new IDE lets you debug your stored procedures and functions. "Edit and continue" is resurrected from Visual Basic 6.0.
"Click once deployment" is a neat way to use the web for installing apps. Users no longer need "full trust" permissions set up to install apps. With the advent of isolated storage (available in .NET 1.0), most applications have no reason to access the file system. This will be good in the future, when persistant storage (read: magnetic access elecromechanical storage media, or "hard drives") moves off the desktop and onto a network store.
ASP.NET is a bit more user friendly this time around. The DataGrid designer allows you to easily embed user controls (such as buttons, checkboxes, radios) into columns. To create an ASP.NET project, the developer builds a master page with the look-and-feel for the site, as well as content pages that provide the guts. Most websites work like this already, and this makes such traditional implementations more straightforward. VS2005 now offers a Development Web Server, so that you need not run IIS to debug your applications. This frees you from having to configure and secure a web server. Some things were shown about "Membership Service" web classes to use for user authentication, login pages, and such. Microsoft is now providing tools to manage user accounts, which provide session data and persistant data for a user. Clearly this will save a lot of time for developers building ground-up projects that require site authentication.