MPS and VS 2005

As a member of the development community, it seems almost requisite to comment on the newly-released Visual Studio 2005 beta 1 products.  I learned of the release while on client site participating in a discovery project for a MPS rollout.  One of the things the client was concerned about was the ability to "drive" the provisioning system from their current *nix-based SOP system.  We had been talking about the web services interface as the most probably interface candidate.  During the meeting I was able to download and install the Visual Web Developer 2005 beta 1, and within a matter of minutes build a web service example on the fly and demonstrate to the customer how his existing systems could call the methods and interact with MPS (I happened to be running a copy of the MPF engine on my laptop making the demonstration complete).  Needless to say, it was easy to keep their attention after such an easy and quick example.

Because this client is looking at providing Windows Hosting solutions, they were very interested in ASP.NET and its capabilities.  I was able to easily build a little web site, add a pagable, sortable, editable data grid in what seemed like less than a minute.  I was thrilled to hear the client's reaction... "Let's see my Linux guys do it that easily and quickly!"

You know... this .NET thing... it may just catch on...