At last! The long await is over! Service Pack 1 of Visual Studio 2005 has been released! (Actually it has already been released last Friday but I haven't got the time to download it).

This service pack is the first for VS 2005 which was released on November last year. This update resolves some issues that were found on the earlier stage of the software and including some enhancements.

The service pack is quite big (442mb) so it would take time to download depending on your internet bandwidth. There are 3 versions of the service pack, each targetting the different packages available for VS 2005. Here are the links:

Visual Studio® 2005 Team Suite SP1
Visual Studio® 2005 Team Foundation Server SP1
Visual Studio® 2005 Express Editions SP1

As you may have noticed there are no available downloads for Standard and Professional editions and also the other flavors of Team Suite (TS for Database Professionals, Architects, etc...). These products would be patched using the Team Suite service pack.

Upon installation you will notice that your computer seems to freeze. That's ok, initially it took me 15-20 mins just for the installer to initialize. In totality it took me 2hrs and 30mins just to install this service pack. I really was dismayed as it was the same length of time on installing a fresh copy of VS2005.

The reason for this is that this service pack causes a repair on your VS2005 installation coz it fixes several dll's that is crucial to the software. But I have found this very wonderful blog of Heath Stewart which contains many tips on using VS2005 SP1. Here are the topics that helped me most.

Slipstreaming Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1
Save Time and Space for VS 2005 SP1 by Disabling the Patch Cache

I have just finished installing the update and noticed a few changes on VS 2005. Here it is:

• There is a web applicaiton project in the New Projects DIalog. This is a VS2003 approach of creating webpages. In my opinion, this approach is much better coz I myself wants to manage my Web Projects into a System/ Forms-like management.
• The IDE is much faster. The properties window can now catch up when the user clicks a web control.  And also the switching from Design to Code is also a lot faster now.

Currently these are the only enhancement that I noticed. I will just update this post for future enhancements that would be revealed to me.