I am going to start going over some of the more basic features of Visual Studio 2005 that are significant that you may or may not know about yet.
The first thing they did with ASP.NET Web Projects was to get rid of the project file (no more .csproj). This is both good and bad. It is good because, you no longer have to Rochambeau somebody when they left it checked out when you need to add a new file. It is bad because there is no way to exclude a file from compilation other than to physically delete it from the file structure. This can make things terrible when you do a get latest from source control. All in all, it is probably better but it will take some getting used to.
One of the biggest new features is that IIS is no longer required to be installed on your local machine unless you are writing applications that deal with NTLM authentication, etc. Visual Studio 2005 will spawn a Personal Web Server for a ASP.NET project located anywhere on your file system. If you do have IIS installed, Front Page Server Extensions are no longer required for Visual Studio to access that project. Do you have a side project somewhere on some joebob hoster that only allows FTP support? Visual Studio 2005 can now open projects via FTP.
Web Publishing support has also been improved quite a bit. People might actually use it now. It can be used to keep files synchronized between servers and will tell you which files are not synchronized. It even logs which files it changes, etc. This could be really useful for deploying to tweb41.
With Beta 2's release, I will continue to post more and more so that all of you have the best information for this new product.
Read the complete post at http://www.dotnettipoftheday.com/blog.aspx?id=143