December CTP Impressions

The December CTP made it out during the Month of December. It is of the VSTS bits and you can read more about it here. I'd like to share some of the impressions I've seen so far to start another discussion.

• Paul Murphy seems to be having a lot of fun so far. First he gives out some great instructions on setting up a domain controller. Then he dishes out his first impressions "checkin is NOT a WORD". (Read More)
• Chris was excited about our little Christmas present. There is a great little discussion about it in his comments. Then he serves up his first bug report about Intellisense.
• Chris Menagay found it a "Breeze to install" when compared to beta 1.
• Amit explains why the Device Bits in the December CTP are older than the November CTP as well as dishing out a patch to make the November CTP more device friendly.
• Rob Caron also has some December CTP installation advice.

if you have any older builds be *VERY* carefull to cleanup before installing the DEC bits.
so far I found that:

any bits left over from SQL 05 (the tools, the client) from the MSDN discs or any form of SQL express can lead to an install the is there but half the tools do not work.... like the distributed system designers for example.


also you need to clean your HKEY_CUrrent_User\
reg key that has VS 8.0 ... there are a huge list of keys and values that the uninstall leaves and some of them if left cause things to not work...
example windows form design, no tool box items show up.



and my 2003 server can't seem to get asp.net working right.... still trying to figure out what bits to scrub on that box to make it work.... may have to format and re-load if I can't find a fix soon.


if anyone can tell me how to fix that I'd be *SO* happy

More impressions from Brian Noyes:
http://www.softinsight.com/bnoyes/PermaLink.aspx?guid=0add4d1c-49e2-472f-9791-6e253b5590cf

The Good:

The has been a lot of refactoring going on by the Windows Client team between Beta 1 and Beta 2. Unfortunately some of that has been downscoping and removing features. A lot of stuff has been renamed as well. It looks like most of those changes are in this CTP, so if you want to see something more representative of what the RTM will look like, and a lot closer to Beta 2, then this CTP is good for that.

The Bad

This does not appear to be a very stable release from a Windows Forms development perspective. Just putting together a couple simple data binding scenarios resulted in a bunch of exceptions for things where the designer was doing all the code writing, so it wasn't a lack of understanding of the programming model on my part. So if you want to actually write any significant apps or samples in Windows Forms, I don't think you will want to do it with this CTP.