Visual Studio 2005 RTM

After a very long product cycle, Visual Studio 2005 released to manufacturing today. This is an awesome release that includes a lot of great new functionality. Great job, Developer Division!

The ISO files can be downloaded via MSDN Subscriber Downloads. If you want to know which versions are offered at different subscription levels, check out MSDN Subscriptions for Visual Studio 2005. The Professional Edition ISO is a 2760MB download, and if your subscription level offers it, the Team Suite ISO is 3630MB. If you'd like to know the features that accompany each SKU, the Visual Studio 2005 Product Line Overview should help.

Also, the various flavors of the .NET Framework 2.0 SDKs and Redistributables are available via the Microsoft Download Center.

For those who don't have MSDN Subscriptions, the Express Editions of of Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual Web Developer, Visual J#, and SQL Server will be made publicly available on the Microsoft Download Center on November 7th. You should also be able to find the full boxed product in stores that same day.

If you have a pre-release version of Visual Studio 2005 installed on your machine, please be sure to follow the Pre-RTM Uninstall Instructions. This post by Aaron Stebner does a great job of outlining all of the potential issues.

And, since I've already been asked a few times today, here's a page in the MSDN Library that discusses Installing Visual Studio Versions Side-by-Side. The short answer is that "Visual Studio supports installation of Visual Studio 6.0, Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003, and Visual Studio 2005 on the same computer."

By the way, although I haven't posted about it yet on this blog, I am hiring a Technical Evangelist to focus on the next version of Visual Studio, code name "Orcas." If you're passionate about our developer tools and think you might be interested, please contact me.