Friday, September 29, 2006 6:37 PM codingsanity

No Vista for me

I just cannot stress how upset I am with the Visual Studio team. Since VS2005 was released, developers have been begging Microsoft for a service pack, or even to make the hot fixes freely available. No such luck. Anyway, about 11 months ago, a guy called Scott Wiltamuth announced that the Service Pack would be released in the first half of 2006. Well, since then it's been a bit of a black hole for this alleged service pack. As the bug reports have piled up and up and up, the VS team has been as quiet as a mouse on information about any fixes. We got all sorts of information about new cool things coming down the pipeline, but nothing on the fixes to the last cool things that came down.

Yesterday, in the dying days of Q3, Somasegar announced... wait for it... the BETA of the service pack. So, not in the first half of 2006, but more like 2007. But of course, the VS team must have had some good news for all the .NET developers out there, right? Yes indeedy, Visual Basic 6 will be supported in Vista!

*crickets chirping*

Ummm, that's great Somasegar, but how about those development tools for that managed framework you spent years convincing us was such a good idea? Umm, well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that VS 2005 SP1 will run on Vista, but will have compatibility issues.

Really?!? You've hugely overshot a delivery date for a desperately needed service pack, and you can have the audacity to say it'll still have compatibility issues with the new flagship OS?!? Well, just for some more good news, VS 2003 and 2002 will not be supported on Vista, in flagrant violation of Microsoft's own support policies. Interesting, VB6 - not supported by MS - will work on Vista. VS2003 - still fully supported by MS - will not work on Vista. Apparently the reason has to do with the debuggers, they basically need a lot of work on them to make them Vista-compatible. Microsoft couldn't be bothered to do this work on the older releases of Visual Studio. This is quite simply unacceptable, VS2002 & 2003 are still in mainstream support and will be for years to come, yet that mainstream support does not extend to the new mainstream OS! What this decision means is that Microsoft have lied about their support policies. If we cannot trust that, how are we to make meaningful purchases of Microsoft products? Am I supposed to introduce a fudge factor into support durations?

"Yes I know that this $1,000,000 purchase SAYS it'll be supported for ten years, but in reality it's ten years or new OS, whichever comes first". I can see the finance director being very impressed by that.

What most irritates me about this is that I won't get to run Vista on my development machine. I've played around with Vista and really like it. but I write code that has to run on all .Net Framework versions, and so one of my dev platforms is VS 2002, so until Vista supports that or until .NET 1.0 and 1.1 are no longer installed anywhere on Earth, I cannot drop them. It's a little thing called backwards compatibility, and it's a very sad day when I have to suggest that Microsoft check out what that means.

I'd like to leave you with a quote from a guy called Halo_Four:

"Microsoft products, which I generally prefer, are popular for two reasons: general support for a wide array of current and legacy software, and wide support for the development community. In one fell swoop Microsoft is proposing to stop both. This is a lose/lose situation for all of those who are involved."

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Comments

# re: No Vista for me

Friday, September 29, 2006 7:13 PM by Philip Stevens

This is a well written rant :) I enjoyed reading this and I whole-heartedly agree with you; I was involved with VS 2005 since Beta 1 and we started writing production code with Beta 2; it was thee most exciting time for me personally as a developer and it had the support of Microsoft as a whole. Now it seems the advent of Beta's and CTP's and the need to pump new technology out the door has outpaced current technology and current needs. There is no excitement for helping meet current needs, only for producing fodder about how current need X will be met by implementing Future Product Y (or in this case V). I worked with the VB team on their performance problems that eventually produced the hot fixes that are available today; what they call good enough, I call still obnoxiously slow. I'm sure Visual Studio 2010 will solve these problems though, so I'll just tell my team to be patient :) I still love Microsoft (I have to, they provide every meal I eat ...indirectly speaking), but they are in disarray direction wise. Thanks for the post.

# re: No Vista for me

Saturday, September 30, 2006 12:29 AM by A reader

Dropping VS 2003 at this point is very bad.  That part is right.

But, and let's make this clear, using VS 2002 in production in 2006 is idiotic.  There is no excuse - none - none - none - for not getting to 2003.  Installing 1.1 of the runtime is supported on every single platform that supports 1.0.  I don't care what you think your customers want.  I don't care what they say they want.

p. s. At least you're not saying something like "I'm moving to LAMP".  That would remove all credibility.

# re: No Vista for me

Saturday, September 30, 2006 8:27 AM by codingsanity

With my corporate customers, yes we use 2003, and are gradually moving stuff up to 2005, as changes are made. There I'm lucky, I can exercise a level of control over the systems.

Nonetheless, perhaps I am not so lucky as you, in that I do not always know what framework my customers are running. As such, in some circumstances I must use the lowest common denominator, 1.0. When Microsoft drops support for 1.0, so will I, but until that day, I will support it as a platform.

Not all customers can afford constant, meaningless code churn just to keep up with the latest Framework version. You want to call that an excuse, fine, I try not to screw my customers over. That's my excuse.

I DO care what my customers want, and I DO care what they say they want. I would strongly suggest that you start paying attention to your customers needs too, becaus with an attitude like that, you might lose them to someone like me.

P.S. LAMP?!? I said I was upset, not crazy ;-D

# re: No Vista for me

Monday, October 02, 2006 9:20 AM by ahmeds

Looks like there might be some hope. See http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2006/09/29/777681.aspx

To a degree I think Vista was responsible for the delay on the SP. A case of do we wait for Vista to ship before we release the SP. At the end I think they had to find a compromise.