Microsoft Response to "Visual Studio 2005: Unstable but Highly Recommended"
This article raises a number of different and widely varied issues regarding the release of the Visual Studio 2005. Microsoft is proud of the quality of Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework. We worked with thousands of customers through the development process to ensure the quality of the product. At the same time, these are complex software projects and we recognize that some customers may run into issues. We take these issues very seriously and are working to ensure that they're addressed in a timely fashion.
There are a couple of interesting points that I want to highlight from the article. The first is that everyone who participated in the interview recommended that people immediately adopt Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0. They feel, as we do, that the improved functionality is a tremendous step forward for developers regardless of whether they are building Windows, Web, Office or Mobile applications. The second interesting point is that the issues that were raised were almost universally around the behavior of the tool.
The article starts by raising issues that cause product instability with the designers and the compiler. Several of the solutions that the MVPs recommend, such as uninstalling third-party products and disabling Edit and Continue, are things that we asked them to try as a part of helping us to debug the issues that had been raised by the community. Some of these issues are now addressed in the HotFix available by calling Microsoft's Product Support Services and referencing KB 915038. We are in the process of combining this HotFix with another fix that is currently being verified by customers and will post these as a freely available General Distribution Release (GDR). As the article points out, we are also working towards a general Service Pack that will be available in the third quarter of this year.
However, Microsoft has never recommended either uninstalling third-party products or disabling Edit and Continue as a part of a permanent solution to the problem. The interviewees also raised some questions about Developer Express' Refactor! product. There was an early issue with that product that impacted developers who had installed the Beta, but that has now been addressed. The Visual Basic team worked with Developer Express because we felt that this product added significant value to the VB development experience and we continue to believe this.
The White Screen of Darn (WSOD) is the screen that is displayed to users when a designer fails to load. In previous versions of Visual Studio we tried to show the designer at all costs, and only showed the WSOD in extreme cases where we could not locate a designer. In Visual Studio 2005 we changed this behavior, since showing a broken designer can cause loss of work where broken controls are deleted from the designer and all of the work put into creating and customizing them is lost. By using the WSOD we are trying to bring attention to the errors that appear in the Visual Studio task list so that the user does not continue to work on a broken project. Errors that can cause the WSOD include broken user code that is run at design time, or a deleted or missing reference that is relied upon by components in the project. We recognize that these issues are sometimes hard to diagnose, and we are working on ways to make the process easier.
Beyond the specific issues discussed above, we remain committed to producing the industry leading development experience in terms of functionality and product quality. One of the key initiatives in doing that has been the Developer Division's focus on increased transparency throughout the development cycle. This has manifested itself to developers through efforts like the MSDN Product Feedback Center and our frequent releases of Community Technology Previews (CTPs). Because of these and other community initiatives, we've received significant feedback about the product, which has given us an enormous amount of valuable information about what customers love and about areas where they feel that we can improve.
A related issue that's raised in the article is how Microsoft can guarantee a quality release for Visual Studio "Orcas" given that we are adding new functionality to support WinFx. This effort continues to build on the product quality and transparency initiatives that we initiated in the Visual Studio 2005 release. Customers can expect to see us releasing CTPs throughout the product cycle--including some of the early CTPs that we released before the Visual Studio 2005 product even shipped. We encourage customers to download these CTPs and to provide feedback through the MSDN Product Feedback center. We realize that not all of our answers will be the "thing you want to hear" but we are committed to evaluating each issue that's raised and addressing it as appropriate.
As software, including Visual Studio, gets more complicated we need to enhance our processes in order to ensure that we continue to ship quality software. In an earlier blog entry, S. Somasegar, the vice president of the developer division, talked about our MQ efforts and the ways that we're improving our internal processes. Additionally, we've made a conscious effort to ensure that the "Orcas" release is focused on the right features to meet customer requirements. We know that professional developers will depend on us for providing tools support for Windows Vista and the 2007 version of the Office System, so we have concentrated team efforts on ensuring that our technology solutions in these spaces are rock solid.
