* Edit and Continue
You knew this one would be at the top of the list since Microsoft has been promising it for two years now. For those who might have been watching Lord of the Rings over and over for the last two years, here's the story ...
In VB 6, you could experiment with changes to your program while debugging. Should a loop be initialized at 0 instead of 1? You could change it while the program was suspended in debug mode and see what happened.
That great feature went away with VB.NET 2003 and it was really missed. Microsoft got so much feedback about this that they put it at the top of their list for upgrades in the next version.
The edit and continue option is set using Tools > Options > Debugging as shown in the illustration available below. (Note ... These dialogs were under development at Microsoft right up to the end and even some of the documentation at Microsoft doesn't reflect the final view. The illustration below is the "RTM" production version.)
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One of the reasons it took Microsoft so long to restore edit and continue was that the wealth of other options added by .NET created a lot of complications in making it work correctly. Let me explain:
VB6 offered pretty much "plain vanilla" edit and continue. With Visual Studio .NET, we now have C# and C++, Visual Basic and VBScript debugging, managed code, native code, compact Framework code, and T-SQL code, local and remote, XML web services and XSL transformations, data tips, and data visualizers, breakpoints and tracepoints, threads, modules, memory, and call stacks and both local and global variables. Not everything works with everything else but can you imagine checking out all of the variations and combinations? It's amazing that they actually did get it working.
* The Import and Export Settings Wizard
Visual Studio 2003 had developer profiles where you could choose a preselected set of options for such things as such the Windows Layout optimized for a "Visual Basic Developer" or your own selections. But Visual Studio 2005 goes much further. The import function is something like the old 2003 profiles as shown in the illustration below.
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But the real power comes when you export settings for the editor, projects, debugging, fonts and colors, and other IDE areas to a file that you can import and use on another computer. This gives you the ability to set a standard work environment for an entire development team, for example. If you're a consultant and you work on computers that belong to clients, you can instantly customize your environment to your own preferences. You can even create files that just customize part of the settings, such as the keyboard settings.
The file that all of these settings are saved in has a file type of .vssettings. This is the one to capture on a flash drive or even place on a network share so everyone can automatically get the latest settings.
