What a vintage blogging moment in time, reading Paul Wilson's thoughtful overview of a few .NET 2.0 foibles and the intelligent responses from fellow developers, 95% of whom agreed with everything Paul had to say! I love those viral developer community posts. Count me in with the 95% who agreed with Paul.
But Paschal L's official request for a Beta 3.0? Dude! Your large cantalopes are an admirable quality and one of the reasons I read almost everything you have to say, but we need .NET 2.0 in factory-sealed cardboard boxes, streaming on conveyer belts into the ass-ends of big trucks. You're asking the Microsoft Slug Machine to take even MORE time releasing something? Crack alert!
It's all incremental. I mean, there are some sizzling new features in .NET. I love it! But then there are those "I'm losing it!" issues, like for me why I can no longer debug a web service from a windows form. Oh, it's probably just me and I may yet discover the key to revisit .NET 1.1 Web Service Debug Joy, but I'm probably, oh, 40% more productive because I'm working in VS2005. Yeah, probably 40% because of the IDE and language enhancements. Then again, if I were able to do real-time debugging of the Web Services being called from the Smart Client App I'm building (instead of duplicating data calls from asp.net web pages,) I'd be at least 25%-to-30% more productive with the project. So I've moved to VS2005, can do things I was not able to do in VS2003, like Click-Once Deployment, and get a whole 10% boost in productivity after figuring in the trade-offs. It's incremental, Dear Watson.
To tie up the loose ends on this little thought dump, definitely check out a post by Jeff [no-last-name] on weblogs.asp.net with his cleverly titled "Oh my God! The sky is falling on .NET v2!" What makes this post such a stand-out is that both Paschal L and Paul Wilson provide brief clarifications on their positions which reveal both mens' excellent grasp on the issues and the bigger picture.