I have been using the Visual Studio .NET 2005 beta for a while now, and it’s just amazing. But the problem, of course, is that the code I write at work needs to be compiled to .NET 1.1 (which is associated with VS 2003).

My dilemma has finally been solved: Robert McLaws and company have a release candidate for their MSBuild Toolkit for Visual Studio 2005.

MSBuild is a tool which comes as part of VS 2005, and allows you to create different build profiles for your projects – including compiling to different versions of the .NET framework. the MSBuild toolkit makes it even easier, by providing a GUI add-in to VS for configuring the build profile for your project (otherwise you have to manually edit some config files in the project).

So I’m happily using VS 2005 for nearly all my .NET programming now…