DotNet2.0

What's new http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/7cz8t42e(VS.80).aspx and http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/t357fb32.aspx

Pros

• Assemblies should just compile. However there will be a large number of warnings. These can be switched off with either an attribute on the method(Visual Studio 2005 gives you a help link detailing this) or by using the #pragma warning in the file.
  

Cons

• Deployment of ASP.NET seems very different. While web sites compiled against dotnet1.1 will just work when the server is updated to dotnet2.0, there does seem to be a big difference in the output of a dotnet2.0 compilation seems very different (unless that's just in debug)
  

Visual Studio 2005

Pros

Backwards compatibilty

• If you download MSBEE from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/downloads/tools/msbee/default.aspx then you can compile against dotnet1.1 or dotnet2.0
  

ASP.Net

• Web deployment now built into Studio 2005
  

IDE

• Integrated reSharper
  
• Refactor support built in (Method extraction, find ALL references, Rename)
  
• Smart Tag support in IDE (Shift-Alt-F10) provides access to unknown types, or rename vars
  
• Rename vars with Preview
  

Data support

• Hugely improved Stongly typed dataset support in IDE - although investigation maybe needed to work out how to use with <XXXX>Framework
  

Cons

• Will require upgrade, so costs for new licence.
• The project files and solutions are in a new format. Studio automatically performs the conversion for you, BUT you can't save in a backwards compatible format. i.e. Unless everybody moves to VS2005 then we will either end up with parallel project files or developers using VS2005 cannot check in changes to projects into Version control.