I read this morning on ScottGu's blog about the new Visual Studio Web designer. It looks promising! I've always found the Visual Studio 2003 annoying especially when switching views... Visual Studio 2005's designer is less annoying but still not perfect. So it's about time we see the Least Annoying - this is going to be my word - expectation - on it till I try it ! .

Here's a list of some of the new stuff in the designer taken from Scott's blog.

Split View Support (the ability to have both HTML Source and WYSIWYG design open simultaneously)

Extremely rich CSS support (CSS property window, CSS inheritance viewer, CSS preview, and CSS manager)

Dramatically improved view switching performance (moving from source->html design mode is now nearly instantaneous)

Support for control designers within source view (property builders, event wire-up and wizards now work in source view)

Richer ruler and layout support (better yet, values can be automatically stored in external CSS files)

Designer support for nested master pages

I look forward to playing with this when the CTP is out.

I was trying to install VS 2005 SP1 on Windows Server 2003 last night but kept getting an error about an invalid signature (or something like that anyway - can't remember the exact error now)

The cause of the problem as stated on the Microsoft website  is "This problem occurs when the computer has insufficient contiguous memory for Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP to verify that the .msi package or the .msp package is correctly signed."

The solution can be found here.

Just read about one of the nice new features available in VS 2005 - Code Snippets! In VS 2005 you can select code from a list of commonly used patterns and  "What makes code snippets really cool is that you can easily create and define your own." as Scott says.

The snippets are not available in C# by default but you can download them from here

See Scott's post for more detail on this here

I've just come accross a blog post by John Rivard a developer on the VS Team. The post explains why Visual Studio 2005 does not support older versions of the .NET Framework. See it here

I previously blogged about about the First Visual Studio error message I got here. I believe I know why I had this error, but forgot to blog about it a while back. Well, what happened initially was that I installed visual studio and the .NET framework on another partition drive than the root one that has windows on it. It seems that this upset the references to the framework and a few other things, as I not only got the error above, but also, errors saying, cannot load package blah blah blah ...etc.

After I got sick of all that I installed VS 2005 and the framework again on the root drive, and things seemed to be ok since. So either this was the issue or I did one stupid thing in the first installation that I somehow avoided doing the second time!

Just saw the following message on the VS 2005 News blog. To see the message check the MSDN Product Feedback blog here

Right, so I've setup myself VS 2005 this week finally, while I haven't dug hard in development yet. Here is my first error message encounter in VS 2005.

Here's how I got it, I click the help menu, then choose Search, and bingo, I get the Index Search window as well as this message. Anyone know why this occurs or how to get rid of it?