Couple of short miscellaneous items to balance the tome I wrote last time:

1. The Start Page in Visual Studio can be customised to show your own news feed rather than the default one. Go to Tools | Options | Environment | Startup. I'm also told you can use something like http://www.feedjumbler.com to collate a bunch of your feeds together into one which you can then use as the main feed for Visual Studio. I'm feeling “sign-up“ averse today so I haven't checked out Feed Jumbler
2. You can also set the number of recent items that appear on the start page. Tools | Options | Environment | General and change “items shown in recently used lists“. Note that this also changes the number of items in File | Recent Files and File | Recent Projects.
3. There appears to be no way of getting rid of the Getting Started and Headlines sections.
4. Have been playing with the beta of ReSharper 2.0 and love it. Type “throw new“ and it displays only available exceptions. Reference a class with no corresponding “using“ statement at the top and it is added for you. Type “using“ at the top and it displays the full hierarchy of namespaces available, not just the current level. And I've only been using it for a day. But it is uninstalling as we speak. Granted, my laptop is two years old and showing its age, but there is a very noticeable drop in performance of Visual Studio 2005. Plus I got some unhandled exceptions when working in a SQL database in Server Explorer. Tried to submit the error to help the developer folks out but that required me to sign up for something. See point 1. Regardless, when I upgrade my hardware and when they're out of beta, I'll gladly hand over $150 for it (pending a review of Code Rush).