I performed a full install of Visual Studio 2005 and MSDN today.  It took under an hour on my Windows XP laptop without a single reboot.  This is a marked improvement over the VS 2003 install.  So for 5Gb of HDD space what did I get?

  • .NET Framework 2.0
  • .NET Compact Framework 
  • SQL Server Mobile and Express Editions
  • Visual Studio for C#, VB, J# and C++
  • MSDN Full Install
  • MSXML 6.0
  • MSBuild
  • And stuff I simply don’t want to know about…

This is not really a bad trade.  Looking at some of the new directories on my machine, I think its time to delve a little deeper into MSBuild and Microsoft.NET.