Visual Studio 2005 Express October Community Tech Preview now available

The October Community Tech Previews for Express are now up on MSDN for download. Before you do anything, read the readme and remember that Community Tech Previews are *not*, *not*, *not*  high quality builds and will probably be in worse condition then Express Beta 1. Lots of things won't work, and we've also added some new stuff including: 

  • Edit and Continue for C# Express. You'll have to do some workarounds to get this working (see below)
  • ClickOnce deployment for all Express products, but be warned that it doesn't work in this build :)

I'll blog more about the changes tomorrow, in the meantime spin up a differencing image on your VPC and take the CTP for a whirl. As always tell us what you think.

Below is the snippet on C# Express from the CTP readme:

C# Express  

"Edit and Continue" is now available in C# with the following known issues:

  • Making an edit that results in no change (i.e. inside a #ifdef'd out region) can cause the IDE to crash.
  • The Instruction Pointer (yellow arrow) can in some cases be placed incorrectly after stepping when an exception has been thrown.

Issue: If you are working with code built from the Windows Forms Template (and a few others), you may not be able to do EnC at all.

Workaround:

Remove the "= null" initializer of the components field in the .designer.cs file as follows:

private System.ComponentModel.IContainer components = null;

should become: private System.ComponentModel.IContainer components;

New Start Page: It is not enabled by default in this build. See known issues for a work-around.
ClickOnce is added to the Express SKUs: However, it does not work in this build.
New Community Menu: A few new features around community interaction.
New Local Data Wizards: Try connecting to your SQL Server Express database files using the new wizard.
Fewer Refactorings: To simplify the C# Express user experience, a few of the refactorings have been removed.
Start page doesn't show correctly: To see the new start page use Tools -> Options. Then "Show All Settings". Then Environment -> Startup. And set "At startup: " to "Show Start Page".
ScreenSaver Starter Kit won't load.