Visual Studio and .Net 2.0 Beta 2 and SQL Yukon Beta 3

Just got a whirlwind hands on tour of these products from Rob Burke of Microsoft which is great reinforcement for all the stuff I have been reading to actually see it in action. Beta 2 if VS.Net is offically released next week.

AppDev.com are providing a free intro cd on Beta1 with the basics but its very high level, perhaps the full course goes into it in more detail.

VS.Net Express will be released for free and will be well worth downloading even if just for the XHTML support so all generated code and controls will only output XHTML to the schema you choose XHTML 1.1, Transitional etc.

The Demo of VS.Net Team Developer edition was cool with code coverage, integrated unit and system testing, bug tracking and a new source control system. Microsoft are using this system to build Longhorn which is a 1st aparently that they use their public tools to build internal products.

SQL 2005 Beta 3 was also very impressive, the demos included: SQL Management Studio, integrated XML data types, running .Net assemblies in SQL server, Web Services exposure of stored procedures. Also mentioned was new SQL Queue manager I tip to replace MSMQ