1) It got splited in various places. For example when you are in the dialog editor you can right click the dialog and you can do "Add Class". Then you can select a button for example and in the Properties window (Alt-Enter) you can see its messages/notifications (like BN_CLICKED) and attach handlers (Note: to see these messages in the properties window you need to click the button with a lightning on it).

2) Go to View menu, Other Windows submenu and you have there Resource View. Once visible you can drag it anywhere including making it a tab in the project window.

3) There are no *.clw files anymore. Not needed.

4) For one thing the functionality of the 2005 IDE is the same or better than in VC++ 6. The only problems that you can have is when you upgrade code. For example the compiler is more close to the C++ standard and some things that compiled in VC++ 6 may fail to compiled in VC++ 2005.

The thing that I miss about ClassWizzard from VC++6 is that there was one window where I could see all the variables that I used per dialog/class. If I go away from my project for a while then come back I will have to click through all the controls on the dialog to find out if I finished assigning them variables or not. I don't understand why removing it was a good thing...but no point arguing about it.

I didn't know clw files are gone; thanks.

Yeah I found out how to add resource tab into the Project/Solution wonder; I'm surprised that it's not there by default. The good thing is, it's now very easy to export import IDE configurations so I won't have to deal with this in the future.

I do find VS2005 IDE different but I wouldn't say it's worse at least the standard edition. I did have small problem though today, I loaded up a project then went to project settings and I didn't see any linker options; it simply wasn't there . So I closed the project and tried to open it again and it was there.

One last question I have: If I use MFC libraries dynamically when I distribute my applications where can find the latest mfc80.dll and msvcrt.dll For now I'm just statically linking...

I converted about 50K lines of code MFC project today from VC++6 to VS2005 and besides the obvious strcpy/strcpy_s and related stuff it was a straight port. VS2005 even fixed few for loops with variables being used out of scope.

Thanks for your help!

"I will have to click through all the controls on the dialog to find out if I finished assigning them variables or not"

Indeed, it seems that this kind of functionality is missing, I don't see anything similar.

"I'm surprised that it's not there by default."

That may be because of what template settings did you choose when you have installed VS.

"If I use MFC libraries dynamically when I distribute my applications where can find the latest mfc80.dll and msvcrt.dll "

Probably the best thing is to do a Setup project and add the primary output of your MFC project to it. It will automatically detect that it needs MFC and it will the merge modules that contains the MFC and CRT libraries.

In addition there is separate installer for VC libraies that you can find in a path like this:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\BootStrapper\Packages\vcredist_x86

However, if you have SP1 there may be a bit of a problem. I don't have it myself but I have seen reports that SP1 does not update these merge modules or vcredist so until this are published on the Microsoft download site you should probably stick to statically linking.