I'm currently doing a big project on .Net 2.0, you might have figured that out because that is about all I talk about lately. I did a short code review for myself recently, and I noticed that I used  just about every new feature of C# 2 that came out short of partial classes (and they would be used on the UI).

Of the top of my head, here are the features of C# 2.0 that I love:

• Anonymous Delegates - I really hope that whoever it is who is going to maintain my code can wrap his head around it (I know that some people have problems with that), because I use it is cool, fun, and saves a lot of work. I just love it.
• Iterators - This is a really cool way to run over an object graph. It's really simple on both sides of the code. The one thing I regret is that there is no way to do some sort of lazy sorting, but that is mathematically impossible to do anyway.
• Generics - They are cool, save a lot of typing, but not really exciting except in what they
• #pragana warning disable - Very useful to tell the compiler, I know what I'm doing here. Currently I'm using it to shut some warnings about unused fields that I'm setting via reflection.
• sealed classes - It's good to have an easy way to do it.

Of the top of my head, here are the features of VS 2005 that I love:

• Slicker UI
• Some refactoring support (but not as good as ReSharper).
• Ability to edit / view the database directly from the IDE.

All in all, I'm not very impressed with all the new abilities of VS 2005. I'm sure that they demo nicely, and you can probably show me some stuff that will evoke a Wow! out of me in some areas, but I don't see the big improvement in the IDE that I expected to. It is very annoying because you can see that they almost got it.

One thing that I really like is the code coverage for unit testing, when you activate that, you can see what parts of the codes were visited. This is a killer feature, but I can't figure out how to use that with NUnit, and I can't use VS Unit Test framework because that one is totally unsuitable for tests.

There was some discussion today about the pricing for VS 2005, so I headed here to check it out. I think that I (personally) think that I'll either goes with VS.Net Standard, since this gives me most of the nice features that I need, at only slightly unreasonable price ($300). The problem with that is that this doesn't include MSDN subscription. Getting that means shelling out $ 1,200 which is a lot to me.

So far I have done wonderfully by using a $90 VS 2003 Standard, but I keep hearing about all those new stuff that are avialable to MSDN subscribers only... I think that I could be very happy with C# Express, except for the little fact that it doesn't support add ons. I can't see myself living without ReSharper and TestDriven.Net.

I'm currently trying out Sharp Develop 2 (from the subverison repository), and while I think that it's a great effort, past experiance shows that it's not quite ready for prime time. Even if I would decide to go this way, I would still need ReSharper. Another option altogether is to wait for the JetBrains .Net IDE. Considerring my love for ReSharper, I may even save some money on this one.

Any suggestions from people who already made this decision?