For the last month I’ve been working on a little side project using
Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005.  So far I’ve been quite pleased
and for Beta software it is amazingly stable.  One of the nicest
things is to have your unit test shells autmagically created for you by
simply right clicking and selecting Create Test.  On top of that
it is so much nicer to be able to run or debug the tests without having
to attach to the NUnit process.

The project is a WinForms systems and previous Visual Studio
implementation have made using a grid difficult unless you wanted to
use data binding.  I was so very pleased with the DataGridView and
the control over column and row settings and the ease in which you can
manually add data.  Relase one of my software will only implement
a readonly version of the grid, but release two has already been marked
to use the grid edit features of the DataGridView.  It’s so nice
to finally see the development environment ship with a feature rich
grid.

SQL Server Enterprise Studio took some getting used to but all the SQL
2000 features are there and more.  So far my implementation of the
tool has not delved into any of the nice to have new things like CLR
Stored Procs.

Overall 2 thumbs up and I’m looking forward to the release party out at Silver City in November.