I haven't been working with Visual Studio 2005 that much thus far; the project I've been working on for the last 8 or so months was launched before VS2005 came out (around beta 2), and given the relatively schedules between milestones (first version was to be demoed in about two months) it seemed far too risky to invest in a codebase around the yet-unproven features of .NET 2.0.

I still think that was the right decision. I've been doing some work with Visual Studio 2005 lately, primarily on PostXING and other minor projects, and have come to the conclusion that Visual Studio 2005 is practically unusable. The IDE is even heavier than Visual Studio 2003, ridiculously slow and extremely prone to stalls; it feels like working on a huge solution in VS2003 with a buggy alpha version of ReSharper. The debugger has an incredibly annoying tendency to just stall for tens of seconds at a time whenever I step in/out/over. The IDE feels more like NetBeans than Visual Studio, and is about as responsive, but while NetBeans can be forgiven as a relatively new - and partially open source at that - effort, Visual Studio 2005 is an evolutionary step on a reasonably mature IDE that itself is the 7th version of a 12 or so year-old effort.

Too bad I can't really stick with 2003, it's just not an option - but I would rather have my trusty old combination of VS2003 and R# (which in itself is not without issues) than the heap of bugs and unoptimized UI that is VS2005. At least until VS2005.1 comes along (maybe they'll launch VS2006 with .NET 2.1, like they did with 2003...)