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What's Next...?

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Every Christmas Day we cook a rib roast on our BBQ - and even as much as we look forward to the result, it can be a frustrating experience. Not because cooking outside on Christmas is often cold and rainy in Seattle, but rather because after five to six hours of close temperature monitoring and slow cooking the final step is to "let it rest" for 20-30 minutes. It's off the grill, sitting loosely covered on the cutting board in the kitchen, filling the room with wonderful smells, and we can't...quite...yet...cut..it...and….start…..to…...enjoy. Those of you anxiously awaiting the imminent release of Whidbey know exactly what this can be like. Trust me though, it's almost dinner and it will be worth the wait!

So, now that Whidbey is "off the grill", what comes next for all these cooks we have in our kitchen? The answer is a few well deserved (we think) days off, and then we start planning and preparing for the future. And in this future you should expect to see two major lines of effort: making customers successful on the products we have already released (a list that is about to include Whidbey!), and getting started on the next major release of Visual Studio and the managed code runtime and frameworks.

I can't begin to lay out the entire roadmap for either effort here, but I do want to give you some visibility into one part of the process that will be starting very soon. One of the first signs of activity some of you are likely to see is that the customer bugs that were postponed as we drove through the end game of Whidbey will be re-activated for consideration. Those of you who submitted postponed bugs in our feedback center will soon see that they have been "reopened". Then over the next four to six weeks or so our product teams will go over each bug to find an appropriate disposition. Many will be fixed. Others will turn out to be product suggestions, and will be examined in the context of other feature requests and requirements for the next version. And, in the end, a few will likely not make the cut either as bug fixes or as feature requests. In all cases you can expect to see the status changes and the reasoning behind those changes. You will also be given opportunity to comment on resolutions you might not agree with. Whatever the resolution of your particular issue, please know that we value your feedback and are committed to working openly with you to address the issues that you have raised.

Finally, a brief thought about those issues we are able to fix. You should expect that the majority of these fixes will be available first in the next major product version. We do intend, however, to work with you to identify the customer reported issues with broad impact and/or appeal and to include those fixes first in the major Whidbey servicing releases along the way. Stay tuned for more details on when and how we will be soliciting your feedback on what should be in our first Whidbey servicing releases…!

And for now I hope you feel the excitement over the Whidbey "meal" we are just now laying out. Dig in!

Eric Peterson
Group Program Manager
DDCPX

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2005
    I think with the VS.NET 2003 release you, folks, got too carried away with roasting Whidbey. VS.NET 2003 has been infested with bugs, and yet not a single service pack shipped.

    Now that Whidbey is off the grill, there's too much talk about Orcas. I don't know if anyone actually sits to a non-MS developer and observes him/her struggle with VS.NET 2003, but I hope you won't abandon support for Whidbey like it happened on the previous iteration. So far support of existing developer products has been sub-par.

    Other than that congratulations on the (approaching) release of everything 2.0!

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2005
    Hi Milan -

    I hear you! I won't argue that we've done everything we could have around making our customers successful on VS2003, but I am seeing some very good signs here in the division that we will not be repeating that approach with Whidbey. For example, we are hard at work hammering out a proposal for a service pack roadmap, and will make sure we get customer input on both schedule and content of our major Whidbey servicing releases.

    And, although it has admittedly been long in coming, we are working on an SP1 for VS2003 as well.

    In short, our aim is to show everyone that we can be excited about our current release, building our next release, and making sure our customers are getting a great experience with recent previous releases, all at the same time.

    Thanks,
    Eric

  • Anonymous
    November 06, 2005
    I had heavily used MS tools for the last 15 years and an can say that by far VS.NET 2005 is the buggiest piece of code every shipped by MS (that I encountered). It is unfortunate that this page adds itself to a bad enough history of .NET. Starting with abandoning code assets of a lot of enthusiastic VB5/6 customers and followed by two releases of bug infested VS.NET, the last iteration tops it all. I think by now it is a very valid question if MS is able to provide a usable tool for non-web developers nowadays. Last 8 years proved that all the patience was for nothing. The .net picture is big but I bet that 90% of the developers would prefer a smaller picture that actually does the job - not only the evangelist's job! The time between the last good quality release (vs6) is too long, the time of experiments passed and developers need solid quality code to work with and deploy. If my clients would know the quality of the tools I work with they will switch to a different platform in an instant (I would do it myself to if I was not that deeply nailed into the ...net). The easiest part is done here. No more MS SQL ever on my or on my customers machines. VS will follow. Sorry - I really loved MS developer tools. Everyhing has and end and this lesson is always hard to be learned again.

    Good luck in regaining a bad damaged reputation. Ovi.

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