Well, I don't usually post to this forum but I can't believe how negative the tone is here and thought I'd add my positive feedback.

At work (financial software house in London) we have been using VS2005 since Beta 2 and now we're on RTM (our product isn't due to be deployed til mid-2006).
At home I've been using VS2005 through all the betas and CTPs (yes, I'm a glutton for punishment) and now I'm using the RTM.

I've been doing C# ASP.NET and Win Forms and my experience has been:

Beta 1 - a painful experience. IMHO it was really just a tech preview.

Beta 2 - pleased with stability. Some annoying bugs but no showstoppers for us.

RTM - Stable and, for the most part, a pleasure to use. This is what VS2003 SHOULD have been.

One area of VS is too slow for me though: every time I CTRL-TAB to a web form the designer surface takes far too long to build itself - even when I haven't modified anything.

But overall I am very pleased with VS2005 and .NET 2.0 RTM. I don't for one moment expect it to be bug-free - especially considering how many changes have been made.

Going forward, it would be great if we could get service packs for VS only - so that we can get rid of bugs that affect developer productivity while not having to worry about .NET framework compatibility.

RE: The Help - yes I agree it has always been painfully slow and it still is (personally, I prefer to google MSDN). But I am VERY IMPRESSED with the richness of the new documentation. Whereas the previous documentation was just a glorified API reference, the new MSDN2 library content can now honestly be considered as HELP. Way to go!

So IMHO VS2005 didn't RTM too early - and I'm glad that Microsoft has finally taken delivery dates seriously.