I've been messing around with Visual Studio for about a year now, and want to start getting serious about learning it and doing something halfway complex with it...

I've been using an eval copy, and it's time to buy a real copy, but I'm not sure which version to buy. I was going to get C# 2003 standard edtion, but I don't know if I should hold off until 2005 is released. If I did that, what version should I get? I doubt I would purchase professional or team system, but I don't know about the express edition. It sounds like some cheesy watered down product, but perhaps someone will prove me wrong. I really don't want to pay $300 for the VS 2005 standard either...

I'm partially inclined to just buy C# 2003 standard, since I already have 4 books geared towards 1.0 and 1.1 development. But other than that I have no investments in .net code at the moment, so maybe it would be better to start with 2005. Is VS 2005 really that different? I've been hearing about a lot of changes to ASP.NET, which I plan to do a lot of development in.

Thanks for any tips,

Brian Vander Plaats