Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 Final Release Candidate review

When Visual Studio .NET (VS .NET) was first released, its scope was breathtaking. It encompassed a brand-new virtual machine, one or arguably two new languages (C# and Visual Basic .NET), a new IDE complete with visual form designers for both Windows and web projects, plus a vast new class library. Considering its complexity, it has proved remarkably reliable. Unfortunately, though, developers aren't very forgiving and dislike having bugs in their development tools, and there were plenty of them in the first version of VS .NET, some serious enough to postpone projects until the long-awaited bug-fix release, VS .NET 2003, arrived.

However, what was most surprising about the first release of VS .NET wasn't the presence of bugs, but the fact it took so long to fix them. Two service packs were released, but these mostly addressed security issues. The bugs weren't just minor irritations either. For example, when you tried to use the standard print preview class, your application would throw an exception in most installations of Windows 98. Another nasty, again in Windows Forms, was in the menu classes. Menu items could be created but not disposed, so if your application created menu items dynamically it would eventually run out of memory. Another bug caused applications to run extraordinarily slowly on Windows NT 4. The problems tended to be worse in Windows Forms than in other areas of the Framework, possibly because the company focused more intensively on XML and ASP .NET.

The pre-release version of VS .NET 2003, reviewed here, fixes all these problems and more. In practical terms, this is the release's most important feature and may trigger wider adoption of the .NET technology. However, it's not just a service pack, as it also brings some previewed .NET technology to the first full release and introduces some brand-new features.

Of the three versions that will be made available, the Professional Edition is the most well endowed with regards to features, including pretty much everything you could possibly need of VS .NET. The Enterprise Developer Edition includes source control, development licences for Microsoft server products, and the ability to use Enterprise Templates. The Enterprise Architect Edition adds modelling with Visio 2002, plus the ability to create Enterprise Templates.

From handhelds to web servers

VS .NET is intended to be a universal tool. You can code both web server applications and rich clients. If you go for a web application, you may choose between web forms for a visual web interface, Web Services to expose an API over the Internet, or mobile web forms to support devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.

On the rich client side, there are Windows Forms applications for the desktop, Smart Device applications for Pocket PC or other Windows CE devices, or old-style Win32 applications (if you're using C++).

The unifying piece in this diversity is the .NET Framework. Aside from the Win32 option, you can use the same language and the same core classes in all the project types. Even where there are fundamental differences, such as between rich client and web applications, Microsoft has tried to retain some consistency. For example, buttons, textboxes and listboxes exist both for Windows and the Web and present a similar set of properties, methods and events. It's a great improvement on Visual Studio 6, where each language had its own individual framework and ASP applications were limited to script-calling COM objects.