VS.NET 2005 beta 2 is finally available in MSDN subscriber downloads, as I’m sure I’m not the first to report. Now if only the download would use more than a third of my download capacity… So we’re talking tomorrow at the same time, if things keep up. Hm.

I’ve heard similar information from other sources, but now Mark Bower said it out loud in his blog post: VS 2005 beta 2 is nearly there and should be available for MSDN subscribers a while before the 25th. Early next week, or maybe even a little earlier than that?

In a recent post, I announced a plugin that would bring a few features from nostalgic Emacs days to the modern world of Visual Studio 2003 and CodeRush. I received some feedback on that first version and now the Updated, Fixed and Obviously Much Better New Version™ is available. To start with, here’s the download link again, for the current version: CR_ElectricEditing-current.zip

If you need instructions to get the plugin installed, rev …

One thing I loved back in those days when I was using (X)Emacs as a development platform was the fantastic support for editing programming languages. Obviously, C and C++ were the programming languages everybody wanted to edit at the time, and Emacs had various editing modes for these languages. The culmination point was the arrival of CC Mode, but even before that the c mode and c++ mode for Emacs had features that were called “electric”. Years later, IDEs in the MS world have finally caught u …

I’ve always been wondering what would happen when the number of icons in the VS.NET 2003 splash screen exceeded 10… because it looks like the splash screen would be “full” then. But I always thought okay, they didn’t think about this very well. Hm… now I found out, it stretches to make room for additional lines:

Rob Mensching has published a really interesting article on MSDN where he talks about why and how the process of creating software setup programs should and can be integrated in the overall development process. I support most of what he’s saying, and even if you don’t, the article is an interesting introductory read about WiX. …

For a long time now, users of Visual Studio have been complaining about the lack of proper images, icons and other artwork in the package. VS always came along with some ancient artworks that have been delivered in that same unchanged form for many years now. The MSDN product feedback center has an entry for this issue and a huge number of people have been voting for a new set of artwork to be included with VS. Now Microsoft tells us they have finally done something about this! There are blog e …

Roy Osherove has some interesting references and arguments about explaining Pair Programming (to management mainly) in this blog post. A lot of additional information, as he also says, can be found here.