Whidbey Community Preview is here!

Check out the new Visual Studio 2005 home page. If you are an MSDN subscriber, PDC/VSLive attendee or an Alpha participant, you should be able to get a Preview build of Whidbey soon (if you haven't already!). These are very recent bits, so there are a bunch of updates and new features since the PDC.

I now have a chance to blog about some of the cool new features we added since the PDC! If you get a chance to play around with the build, do give us feedback. This is still an early build, so there might be bugs you encounter as you use the product. Even so, I think it is a good opportunity to take a look at the changes since the PDC.

The page linked above lists how you can give feedback. Please feel free to put your comments on this blog, especially on Client related topics like:

1) Windows Forms - new controls like ToolStrip, DataGridView; enhanced support for XP Visual Styles; layout features; updates and fixes to existing controls etc.

2) Visual Studio Designer - Snap lines, designer action panel, designers for new controls, smart tags etc.

3) General new features like Clickonce and Client Settings

4) Designer Infrastructure features - serialization, designer hosting, the new localization model etc.