The title of this post might actually be more appropriate if it was called what aren’t they planning. If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know that I was an active beta tester during the Visual Studio 2005 beta period. Microsoft sent me (and many others) a Customer Appreciation Award. Nice token, thanks for that.
However, after the release of VS 2005, I still found some annoyances. I posted two feedback items at the Microsoft Connect site ([1] and [2]) on November 21. Only now have I gotten feedback on those items’ status. I can understand that, the team had probably lots of other things on their mind, such as VS 2005 Beta 1.
However, I am concerned about the reply that was posted for both topics. If you have a Microsoft Connect account, I encourage you to look at the items and judge for yourself; but, in my opinion, these are fairly minor changes. One would require adding a missing runat=”server” attribute to a tag when Local Resources are generated and another would involve automatically generating resource entries for columns in a GridView. The response I got to both items basically stated that these items won’t be fixed for the Orcas timeframe because they would produce breaking changes and the goal for Orcas is to have “a high degree of backward compatibility” [3]. It turns out that the requests I submitted are in the “Red” bits (read the blog post at [3]).
I am concerned because first of all, I was hoping for a fix for these items in a Service Pack; and seeing as how “Orcas” is now supposed to be just a Service Pack where it concerns “Red” bits (again, see [3]), I was certainly hoping for a fix in that time frame. Now, it turns out that even such minor feature changes are not considered for Orcas. So, it seems to me that
Orcas = VS 2005 + (WPF, WCF, WWF designers)
just like
.NET 3.0 = .NET 2.0 + WPF + WCF + WWF
When will that huge dev team at Microsoft get going on delivering high quality software on time on a reasonable schedule?
Sven.
P.S.: Those readers who think I believe Microsoft is the next best thing since sliced bread… there you have it ;o)
[1]: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=104600
[2]: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=104598
[3]: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/05/18/601354.aspx
Sven Aelterman 