Seems to me that there is a lof of bugs in the RTM version of Visual Studio 2005. Here is a random collection of things that I run into recently:

Wesner Moise, Frans Brouma, Roy Osherove, Michael Teper and Rolf Bjarne all have found bugs that I would categorize as Very Serious.

I myself have run into this bug, and ReSharper is nearly unusable because VS.Net doesn't respect the colors that ReSharper tells it to paint. (It paints strange stuff that is horrible to look at.) The whole IDE seems slower than 2003. And I have expressed my opinion about the way it handle those simple things like testing and web projects.

It's interesting to note that nearly all those bugs were known to Microsoft, but were closed because of time constraints. I'm shocked that even after countless CTPs and two betas, there are so many serious-you'll-lose-work-and-tear-out-your-hair bugs in the product. Refactoring is useless the moment you've a web project, period.

I think that there are great things in VS 2005, debug visualizer and great, for instance. But the product is not ready for RTM, in my opinion. Perhaps it is that only since the Beta 2 Go Live license people has started to really move toward VS 2005. It was only then that the more esotoric bugs were found. By then, most of those bugs were resolved as Won't-Fix because of the short time to RTM.

What really frightens me is comments such as Suma's:

The emphasis is mine. I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to wait until 2007 & Orcas to get a functional IDE.

I think that it's imperative that the tools we're using to help us develop will actually.. well, help us develop. If I find myself working in spite of a tool, I'll look elsewhere to something that will replace it. Until now, VS was the crowned king of the .Net IDEs, but with those problems, it's possible for a competitor to show up and turn the tables on Microsoft.

There is such a competitor, it's called JetBrains, and they have superb IDE for Java called IdeaJ. They are going to release an IDE for .Net, which I'm looking forward to use. I don't have any sentiments about my tools. If another tool offer me enough functionality, I'll move.

I'm not the only one who commented about being more productive in Visual Studio 2003 + ReSharper than in Visual Studio 2005 without it. If JetBrains can produce an IDE that would be as smart as ReSharper, they won me. If they can create a transperant experiance for the developer, they will win everyone.

On other news, I created a suggestion on lady bug for a service pack for Visual Studio 2005. I don't think that it would help, but I certainly hope that they would listen for this. I can't remember having nearly as many problems in either Visual Studio 2003 or 2002.

Update:  Anatoly Lubarsky was bitten as well. It's becoming a meme.