After working with Visual Studio 2005 for almost three years now (approximately), having used ASP.net (C#) extensively as well as Windows Forms (C# as well), I think I am able to compare support for those two very different technologies when it comes to Visual Studio support.
After being pretty impressed by ASP.net Support in Visual Studio 2005 (already without the patch), expectations were high when starting to plunge into the WinForms world (i did get in touch with the Designer every now and then, and especially in 2000, when working on a Visual C++ Windows Forms project in study, so i definitely expected more out of the designer than it offered 7 years ago).
First glimpse suggest that the Winforms Desiger is pretty much full-fledged, supports a variety of functions and special tasks, can generate data-bound forms out of a database scheme and so on and so on.
Having said this, generating data bound forms (apart from the fact that i in general rather go for manually coding the data binding) mostly results in a crash, at least with Oracle 9.
Other annoyances include (but are not limited to):
- Selecting and moving controls is not possible while they're set to "Dock = Full" - makes absolutely no sense to me
- The designer recreating .designer code upon compile. Out of several tens of forms, one certain form that is set up of a table layout and an embedded DataGridView spaning 2 rows, is modified by Visual Studio 2005, and the rowspan of that datagridview is lost - so it's being reset to 1. Happens ALWAYS and to always the same form..
- Occasional error messages when open in design view - closing the form and reopen it again usually helps - occured a lot with CAB projects.
And yes, i am talking about Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 !
For a software development application with which probably most Windows Applications are being developed, such issues seem sort of ok in a first version to me. But if one includes Visual Studio 2003, VS 2005 SP1 is the "third" evolution of this breed. Now all i can hope is that customers buying the Team Edition (for quite some money...) DO have a better designer - although out of experience, i highly doubt that.
So not much has changed compared to pre Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 - i still look forward to the Visual Studio Service Pack, which is desperately needed (even after SP1).
(Don't get me wrong, out of the available Software Development tools out there, Visual Studio is definitely most advanced and convenient, though the priciest as well i assume).
