Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET 3.0 - CTP forever?

December 15, 2007 @ 2:22 am- from Maui, Hawaii

I've been working on a project with WCF in Visual Studio 2008 and it of course includes all the tools for .NET 3.0 for setting up WCF services and Service References as well as WPF support. It works great. Unfortunately my customers are not running VS 2008 yet and they are - justifiably so - weary to jump onto the latest MS bandwagon. Well, there's that and the fact that VS 2008 is not available outside of MSDN at this point.

I'm happily using VS 2008 and truthfully this release is more stable for me than VS 2005. Maybe more importantly it has all the tools I use in one place one install, vs. the 10 or so installs you have to go through with Visual Studio 2005 from SP1 plus all the extensions for .NET 3.0 etc. Regardless it'll take a while before my customers are on the VS 2008 bandwagon. So I was planning on just taking my 3.x project and putting the project in VS 2005 just to compile etc. And it worked fine back porting to VS 2005 with two little project tweaks: Changing the solution file and for this .NET 3.0 application changing the build target in WCF project.

One problem however: When I installed VS.NET 2005 on this machine I did a purely minimal install. So out of the box there's no .NET 3.0 support. Took a while for me to realize though (how quickly we forget when using a simpler tool). Now mind you the code compiles just fine, but there's no way to update the service reference and there's missing support for the

So off I go looking for the .NET 3.0 extensions for Visual Studio. Searching, and running only into the November CTP. I keep looking for a while, nope nothing newer until a bit later and some MSDN forum messages confirm the November 2006 CTP is the last release of the extensions for Visual Studio 2005. .NET 3.0 has been out what - over a year in RTM and late last year - November to be exact and Microsoft released a CTP of the tools for Visual Studio right at the launch.

But these tools were never updated and more importantly never released officially. They still bear the CTP nomer. This means that if you're using VS 2005 you have what amounts to beta software to do anything related with .NET 3.0. The tools are fine - they work (at least the WCF components - the WCF stuff is another story), but it sure sucks to tell customers to go and download a CTP SDK so they can use the tools in their projects. The least Microsoft could have done is to pretend they are done with the tools for 2005 and republish the tools without the CTP designation. But I guess even that kind of pretense was too much effort...

Ugh... no doubt VS 2008 is the way forward and I understand that things have to move forward at some point, but it'll take a while for developers to catch up. It doesn't help Microsoft's image to appear to ram VS 2008 down customer throats by abandoning the VS 2005 so quickly for existing tools especially given that the last update was over a year before the release of VS 2008 to RTM.

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re: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET 3.0 - CTP forever?
by foobar December 15, 2007 @ 4:19 am

-- Rick Strahl
> VS 2008 is not available outside of MSDN

Yes, VS2k8 is available even for those who don't have an MSDN subscription. However, the trial version expires in 90 days.

> there's missing support for the ???

In the third paragraph of your post, fill in my question marks.

re: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET 3.0 - CTP forever?
by Lucas December 15, 2007 @ 9:04 am

Even if you're right about needing supported extensions for VS2005, you shouldn't be surprised. Since their release the WCF & WPF extension notes said:

"These tools are provided as an early preview of technology being considered for the Orcas release of Visual Studio. These tools are not supported by Microsoft but provided as is to enable early adoption of the .NET Framework 3.0 platform. Users will be expected to upgrade to the Visual Studio Orcas release when that becomes commercially available.
...
This is the last release of this technology that will be in the form of a set of extensions for Visual Studio 2005."

Also, the WF extensions released the same day are the final non-CTP (supported) release, so saying that .NET Framework 3.0 is not supported in VS2005 is not completely correct.

re: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET 3.0 - CTP forever?
by Dennis Bailey December 17, 2007 @ 12:08 am

Rick,

I've been waiting for VS 2008 myself, very hard to early adopt when you don't even have the product in hand. I'm hoping that your statement is correct that this version of the product is more stable than VS 2005. Sure they have express editions, but IMHO those editions are for the hobbiest or at the very least those developers wanting to try out some of the new features added in the latest release.

I agree that if Microsoft wants developers to early adopt that they need to take care of the developers first, otherwise they are cutting their own throats in the process.

Keep up the great posts, I look here first when I have a problem to see if you are seeing the same things.

Dennis

re: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET 3.0 - CTP forever?
by Peter Bromberg January 10, 2008 @ 9:37 am

True, and there are plenty of other things that we'll have to wait until public release or later to get back - things like the Repository Factory which I was just starting to like...