Ok, so I've had a lot more time to spend in the production run of VS 2005 and .NET 2.0.
First I'd like to say that the deployment isn't as bad as my initial reaction. I have high hopes for the new build tool though since compiling into a single assembly does make sense and helps on my current projects. I definitely understand how different styles would feel otherwise. Frankly we have been very good about seperation so our aspx code behinds are really just calls to a business layer which is a seperate dll. Hence once the layout of pages is settled we usually only have to push the compiled web assembly. So yes, the whole "give aspx pages a pointer to a ugly named dll" is a hinderance in my world since I now had to push pages where I didn't have to previously. For the time being, we're running in "non precompiled mode" with all the code files etc right out on the server.
I love the new IDE, particularily all the warnings for poor code structure that it catches. It allowed me to quickly run through the application and code review it. Several developers have been in and out of this project and being alerted to things like obsolete variables that are never used etc was helpful. I know there were ways to do this previously but it's nice having it automagically fired up in the IDE.
Using statement for VB... thank you!
XHTML compliance and the ide doesn't reformat my html... thank you! I actually use the IDE for my .aspx designer now. Previously because of the vicious (and often silly) reformatting I would often use a vanilla text editor to modify my .aspx files.
Generics are pretty fun too though I haven't had much of a use for them since all my existing classes had collection classes using collectionbase. I suppose in future development this could save some time but if it ain't broke I'm not going to fix it. =)