I'm really worried about this.

I've been using VB since version 3 circa 1991 and when .NET 2002 was
released I was amazed at just how versatile and (apart from a few minor
quirks) how stable it was.   VS 2003 was pretty much the same.

But I've been working with VS 2005 since Beta 2 - I've installed all the
subsequent CTPs and now I'm working with the release candidate and I have to
say I'm extremely concerned.

It appears to be a well known fact that project references and file
references are causing majors problem in VB solutions and it appears that
this will not be fixed for the final release.     (Please tell me I'm
misinformed here.)   The upshot of this is even on RC1 I'm spending more
time trying figure out why a build suddenly fails than actually writing
code.   I've tried manually specifying version numbers in the class library's
assemblyinfo files (which seems to work sometimes), I've tried deleting dlls
from each project's bin directory (which seems to work sometimes), I've
tried Rebuild All (which seems to work sometimes), I've tried closing VS
2005 and re-opening it (which seems to work sometimes) and I've tried
rebooting the machine (which seems to work sometimes).

Working with a multiple project solution (Windows Forms, Web, Web Service
and Class Libraries) has been a nightmare since beta 2 and it's only
slightly improved through to RC1.   (I don't get any targets file errors now
at least)

To add to all this I'm getting random errors such as "the object xxxx in
class xxxx is ambiguous"  (I can't remember the exact wording although I
really should - I've seen it often enough.)   It wasn't ambiguous five
minutes ago before I left the room for a sandwich so why should it be
ambiguous now?   Then, when I try one or more of the methods mentioned
above, it's not ambiguous anymore - at least not for an hour or two.
Sometimes I get a successful build but the code page still shows blue
underlined errors and the error list still shows errors.

Then I got a "Cannot attach - The binding handle is invalid" message when I
tried to run a Windows app.   After a bit of googling I found the answer was
to switch off the "Enable the Visual Studio Hosting Process" in My Project.
Cool - well it was slower but at least I could debug again.   So then I
switched to an ASP.NET project and started getting the same problem.  I
haven't seen a single post about this error when in an ASP project.   Of
course there's no such option as "Enable the Visual Studio Hosting Process"
in an ASP project unless I'm missing something.

Since Beta 2 I haven't been able to search for help (Visual Studio Common
IDE Package' has failed to load) and about every 10 minutes or so my cursor
does a little backward/forward dance when I'm pressing the backspace.   I
have to move left with the arrow keys before the backspace key starts doing
its real job again.  Unbelievable!

Beta 2 was installed on a brand new Windows 2003 server machine.   For every
subsequent CTP and now RC1 I've followed each recommended uninstall sequence
to the letter.   I recently had to go back and work on a large project in VS
2003 and it was like a breath of fresh air compared to VS 2005 - everything
just simply worked.

There are lots of good additions to this version of VS.NET and I applaud the
development teams for implementing them, in most cases very successfully.
But when I'm spending more time trying to work around apparently random
build and debug errors than actually writing code, I really think that
releasing VS 2005 in this state is a very grave mistake.

Russ