Last Friday I was able to download the RTM version of Visual Studio 2005 from MSDN. After installing it on my development machine and making sure everything was working properly it was time to say goodbye to Virtual PC 2004, at least until the next beta version of Visual Studio will be available. Over the last 10 months or so, Virtual PC 2004 proved to be very helpful. With frequent updates of beta versions of Visual Studio 2005, and some issues regarding uninstalling previous versions, Virtual PC 2004 turned out to be a real time saver. Instead of installing Visual Studio 2005 beta versions directly on my development machine, it was a safe idea to have a protected environment like Virtual PC to run the application in. And of course, installing a new version of Visual Studio 2005 simply meant deleting the original Virtual PC image, taking an existing basic Windows XP SP 2 image and installing the new version on this brand new Virtual Windows XP Machine. Without the help of Virtual PC 2004 it would not have been possible to beta test Visual Studio 2005 without using a separate machine for it. My experience during the beta test period of Visual Studio 2005 was great. The only thing missing was the possibility to use a physical USB port from within my Virtual machine. This would have been especially handy to deploy applications to either Smartphone or Pocket PC devices. However, this is the only thing I want to complain about. Of course it is very cool to have the real thing on my development system right now. Visual Studio 2005 performs a little better, and it is really cool to actually be able to deploy and debug applications that are running on real devices. Over the upcoming weeks you will hear a lot about Visual Studio 2005. If you have not seen the product or if you want to know more about it, make sure to tune in to one of the many Webcasts around Visual Studio 2005. I promise you that you will be happily surprised. For now it is back to regular business. That is, until the first test versions of the successor Visual Studio 2005 will be available. Until then, Virtual PC gets a well deserved rest, at least on my machine. I guess there is only one more thing to say. Congratulations to the entire Visual Studio team for releasing a wonderful product. Ok, one more thing then. Please don’t wait too long with releasing test bits of the next version of Visual Studio. After all, I don’t want my Virtual PC to really become lazy.

Maarten Struys