>Just a quick question, over the next few months I have plenty of time to get my feet wet with Visual Studio. The question is this: I do own a full blown copy of Visual Studio 2005, but since there has been a couple releases since then - would I be better to just use a more up-to-date "evaluation" version to practice with, or would the 2005 version do just as well.
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>I know nothing to speak of about .NET, so just don't want to learn an old technology that might have been replaced by something newer.
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>Any thoughts are appreciated.

I guess that, to a certain extent, it depends on what you want to do with it - web stuff, WinForms or WPF.
I'd tend to suggest getting VS2010 in that you will probably need it anyway before another version comes along....
Two of the biggest changes that you'll be missing in VS2005, regardless of the type of application you anticipate, are Linq (introduced in 2008) and dynamic types (in 2010)