I have a little history with a particular pet peeve about debugging data access in .NET. As a former VB4/5/6 programmer, I had gotten very comfortable with debugging ADO (hmm, well, I guess not in 4, that would have been DAO) and being able to see great details of my data objects during debug. In VB.NET, this was taken away. It took me 3 years to learn that C# did have the ability. What was my gripe? When debugging a DataTable, for example, you can see the number of rows in the rows collections, but you can't inspect the rows (very easily). In C#, they at least had access to the "List" property inside of the debugger when looking at the rows collection. That list would expose each row object. This is the same for looking at Tables in a DataSet, Columns in a DataTable, etc.
I was thrilled and elated in April 2004 when I saw that the List feature now existed in Whidbey. Here is my exclamation point peppered blog post on the topic.
Just yesterday I was working some last minute review of a Customized Debugging in VS2005 presentation for DevTeach that I will be doing early next week and was stunned to see the "List" property gone when debugging into a rows collection of a datatable.Then I went and looked for Tables in a DataSet. I even wrote up some quick data access in C# to look for it there. Gone gone gone. Had the ADO.NET team taken this stuff back under the covers? In these days of transparency and enhanced productivity, this just didn't make sense to me.
But not really. The real issue here is that at TechEd, I had the difficult choice of going either to Michele Leroux Bustamante's talk on WSE or Scott Nonnenberg's talk on Debugging in VS2005. Although I am very happy I went to Michele's talk, had I gone to Scott I would have learned about the Just My Code feature that controls the debug window. VS2005 was hiding the greater depths of the framework goo from my debug window because I had Just My Code enabled in the IDE option. There are some nuances to this which you can affect with some of the Debugger attributes. Check the above link for more details.
I think I better first go review Scott's talk, since he has put his deck and demos on the web and then add a few slides to my presentation on this great feature. It is definitely part of customized debugging!!
The moral of the story is that you can certainly spend a LOT of time trying to learn about every of the NEW features in Visual Studio 2005! Though you will NEVER succeed, it is constantly fun (okay, and sometimes really frustrating.)