Coding Sanity

Well, there has been some movement from Microsoft's side as to this whole issue of support for Visual Studio in Vista. Not much, but some. Thanks to ahmed for the link to where bharry discusses a whole range of issues.

HotFixes

They've agreed to now offer Visual Studio hot fixes for download. bharry was very proud that he had managed to get turn-around on this issue in only 3 hours, thinking it pointed to an agile response from Microsoft. Unfortunately the mystery of the unavailable hotfixes has been around for years. Not at all agile, but kudos to him for actually making the effort to get it for us. Although I'd have felt a whole lot better if we'd heard some timeframes too.

Visual Studio SP1 not working fully on Vista

Not much more information on this. On the FAQ page there's an interesting referral to a "Vista Support Upgrade". I'm assuming that this will be another patch to be applied to VS 2005 SP1 before it will fully work with Vista. In other words this may be the patch that fixes the "incompatibilities" between VS2005 SP1 and Vista. It's slated for release in Q1 2007, so around the Vista ship date. Hopefully MS can actually turn this one around in the planned time frame, unlike SP1.

Nonetheless I really don't see getting Vista support in Q1 2007 as as good enough. Vista and UAC have been coming down the pipeline for 5 years. Frankly, they should have been getting ready for it in 2001, not in the dying quarters of 2006!

VB6 working fully on Vista

Good news, Visual FoxPro 9 is also fully supported. How nice.

Visual Studio 2002/2003 not working fully on Vista

Guess what? Besides talk about calling "a meeting for today with the appropriate people in the division to discuss it" and not "promis[ing] we're going to change our position but the feedback is being heard at the highest level and being seriously considered" no real new information. Another missive from Somasegar telling us how hard it is to actually provide support for fully supported MS products. He mentions that people have had success using VS 2002 and 2003 on Vista, but that some scenarios will not work. No information whatsoever on what those scenarios are. It'd be kinda nice to know. If those scenarios are edge-case enough, why can't these two products be supported with caveats? He implies that MS will actively work on workarounds and fixes to these issues, so the question again is why not full support? Hell, I'd even be happy with a time-delayed support. where MS go along and say, "VS2003 won't be supported right now, but will in {x} months time when we release Service Pack {insert number here}"

Even the always restrained Wally McClure is upset. Robert McLaws asks if we'd rather wait until the end of 2007 for "Orcas" in order to get VS003 ready? His answer is no, mine is a resounding yes! Hell, throw it out to 2008, and get me VS2002 support too! Don't get me wrong, I like the bits in .NET 3.0, but keep in mind that I am not asking for something that is out of it's support cycle (like VB) to be compatible with the new flagship OS, I am asking for something still in "mainstream support" to be compatible with Vista, their new mainstream OS! This is what Microsoft promise to do when they have a support lifecycle. Anything short of full support for VS2002 and 2003 on Vista is a violation of their support lifecycles and therefore a shattered promise. One of the main reasons I use Microsoft products is that you can depend on Microsoft. Not this time.

In the FAQ they ask themselves a question "By not supporting Visual Studio.NET 2003 on Windows Vista, aren't you forcing customers to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005?". It's a good question to ask, pity the answer is a complete cop-out. Basically their response is a set of marketing drivel about how Vista and VS2005 are just better. Here's a hint, you're evading your own FAQ question! The simple answer is yes, they are forcing customers to upgrade. No problem for me, I have access to all three versions, but I guess there may be some people not too thrilled by this. I'm pretty sure that this kind of behaviour is generally considered to be product tying. You're using one monopoly product (Vista) to force customers to upgrade to purchase another (VS2005). I can already envisage the coming antitrust lawsuits. Another good FAQ question is "Why support Visual Basic 6 and not Visual Studio.NET 2003 on Windows Vista?", their answer is because it's harder to upgrade a VB6 project to VS2005 than, say a VS2003 project. True enough, but unlike VB6, VS2003 is actually still in mainstream support!

Frankly, the rest of the FAQ is a spew of moronic non-answer self-congratulatory pabulum.

Another suggestion from the MS crowd has been to use Virtual PC to run the older Visual Studios in. Well, for starters, that won't help me debug a .NET 1.1 problem running in Vista will it? Secondly, what about the OS licensing? Is Microsoft going to give me my now required extra XP license for free? Once again Microsoft, not all developers work for huge corporate conglomerates. I'm an independent contractor who pays for most of this stuff myself. Sure, I don't pay for VS, one of my employers does, but everything else I cover. So that extra OS license I need in order to run this so-called "supported software" in "mainstream support" has to come out of my budget. In any case, running a tool in Virtual PC because of failings in the tool has to be the biggest cop-out I've ever heard.

.NET support on Vista

.NET 1.1. and 2.0 applications will be supported on Vista. I note that Microsoft are nowhere saying anything about .NET 1.0 applications. Now, one of the great points about something like .NET is that if I write a .NET 1.0 application that doesn't use any broken changes, it will run fine on a machine with only .NET 2.0 installed. So, if I want to target all frameworks I should write my stuff in .NET 1.0. Oops!.

I'm not sure if he just means that the .NET 1.0 framework won't be installed, which is fine by me, or if he means .NET 1.0 applications will not work for some reason. However, by excluding .NET 1.0 from support on Vista he's once again dropping support for products. So Microsoft would be arbitrarily dropping support for 3 products: VS 2002, VS 2003 and .NET 1.0. Some clarity on .NET 1.0 support or lack thereof would be appreciated.

Conclusion

I wish Scoble was still at Microsoft. There just don't seem to be any internal Microsoft bloggers with the balls to get upset about Microsoft breaking it's support promises to it's customers. If I hear one more comment about how our "feedback is being heard" I'll break something. That's an idiot management-speak phrase that means nothing and says nothing. Maybe we can Mini to discuss this? Although he doesn't often go after Visual Studio, concentrating (rightly I guess) more on the cash-cows, he has had his say about the VS team steam-rolling over developers before.