14 DAY TRIAL // The Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 update for Windows Vista has been available for download as of yesterday, March 6, 2007. If you are a developer, then you will be interested to know that Microsoft is applauding the Visual Studio 2005 refresh as a way to take full advantage of the power delivered by Windows Vista in creating secure, reliable and connected applications. With this update for Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft is further advancing the service pack 1 that was made available in December, 2006.
"With this update to Visual Studio, our goal was to ensure developers have the best possible experience on Windows Vista, and that the features developers are using in Visual Studio work as expected. We fixed a number of significant issues around debugging and profiling, and around creating ASP.NET applications for IIS on the developer machine. We also wanted to improve the feedback that Visual Studio gives to developers when an error occurs on Windows Vista," revealed S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft.
The functionality of Visual Studio was impacted by the evolution of Windows Vista. In this regard, several areas that suffered enhancements in Vista such as User Account Control, the networking stack, and the new graphics model, also affected Visual Studio. With the update to Visual Studio SP1, Microsoft has resolved these issues.
And not a moment too early, as Vista has hit the shelves since January 30, 2007, and Microsoft has experienced a consistent amount of interest from developers over Visual Studio. "We have seen strong adoption of Visual Studio 2005 across all the product families. For example, the Express editions of Visual Studio, which were new with Visual Studio 2005, have had over 10 million downloads. We have also had more than 620,000 developers participate in the Windows Vista and Office 2007 experience program, which was designed to ensure we received feedback from our developer community as we built the next generation of our Office and Windows platform," Somasegar added.
Although Visual Studio 2005 has been compatible with Windows Vista since the first service pack, the update provided a resolve for some functionality issues associated with the VS and Vista integration. However, while Microsoft has with this refresh ensured that Visual Studio 2005 works seamlessly with Vista, a number of third-party development tools are still locked out of the operating system.