Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 beta ships

Over at Somesagar's blog, he announces the availability of Visual Studio SP1 beta.The good news is that this beta is available although there's no indication when an RTM version will ship. But there is some bad news too.

In his post, Soma says: "Ensuring that VS2005 works well on Windows Vista is a core goal of ours.  Visual Studio 2005 SP1 will run on Vista but will likely have a few compatibility issues." He goes on to say: "We are working with the Vista team to understand those, to provide workarounds where possible and also work on providing you with a set of fixes beyond SP1."

At first sight, this seems highly reasonable. But think about it - Vista, 5 years on since Windows XP, may not run Microsoft's core dev platform without compatibility issues. And here is is just weeks before Vista is meant to go gold, and a core application's dev team is still working to "understand" the issues. Surely by now the Vista and VS teams should know about these issues and should have had a solid set of fixes for both products! I find it very unsettling that this issue is being brought up so close to Vista's RTM.

Maybe this is just a bit of text lost in translation. But it sounds more likely that this application compatibility is going to be an issue with Vista RTM. That leads to two conclusions. First that Vista really is not ready for release. Second, that corporate users should just wait for Vista SP1 to start detailed deployment testing.  Unless, of course, Microsoft does the right thing and delays Vista till it really is ready and able to support core applications like Visual Studio.

As an aside, I thought Microsoft used Visual Studio to develop Vista. If so, why were these issues not nailed years ago. And if not, why not????

 

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