After my prior post on VS 2005 bugs, I found my name, splattered all over the blogosphere, culminating in a mention from Mini-Microsoft regarding VS 2005 stability. My post along with those of Frans Brouma and Roy Oosherove initiated a viral phenomenon on the Internet.
Despite the few hiccups, I am enjoying VS 2005 and have been able to work with it productively. VS 2005 is stable and performant, and it’s better to have it arrive now rather than later. The runtime is solid, and various products across Microsoft and outside also depend on it being delivered on a timely basis.
Chris Pratley explains why it’s not practical to remove every known bug; otherwise, the product will never ship. Most bugs have negligible customer impact, yet the act of fixing them often introduces additional bugs (“regressions”) into the product that are likely to be of even greater impact; bugs found close to the release date go through a triage process. Shipping the product later may not considerably improve the product, because of diminishing returns.
There’s also the tradeoff of features against quality. VS.NET (2002) shipped with a number of bugs such as blowing up after encountering a stack overflow exception; VS 2003 introduced few new features, so it was more like a service pack; hence, the quality of VS 2003 is apparently greater than that of VS 2005.
My Internal Compiler Errors initially appeared to be a showstopper, but were due to some inconsistent state in the IDE that necessitated a restart of the application. I later realized that my project was converted to VS2005 after Beta1 around July 1, 2004, which was over a year ago. Any problems that I am seeing may have been done due to changes in VS 2005 since that point, and so the errors may not be a true reflection of VS 2005 stability. This could well be true in the case of MVPs and other influentials, who having been continuously developing with beta products.
VS2005 is not not as terrible as people made it sound, but I have to admit something... After using VS2005 for well over a year every day in production, and rarely using VS2003, I recently starting working on a project entirely in VS2003. I miss the C#2 and language features, but I was surprised that VS2003+Resharper is *much* faster than VS2005 and has been an unexpected refreshing change. Now I dread going back to 2005 because it is so much slower, and refactoring support in Resharper is undoubtedly better in every way :(
Posted by: Sott Willeke | November 05, 2005 at 04:08 PM
I agree, overall it is a really great product. I've encountered a few small hiccups here and there, but overall it's great. I love the new IDE features and the new language additions.
That said, it would be in the best interest of Microsoft's own customers if they released a service pack to VS2005 (if they absolutely must, release VS2006 with a free or very cheap upgrade from VS2005). For known, outstanding bugs that were postponed due to time constraints, MS would do themselves and their customers a favor by releasing a service pack for VS.
Posted by: Judah | November 05, 2005 at 07:51 PM
I don't want a service pack that will ship a year late and will delay Orcas forever. I want hot fixes, maybe monthly rollups, like Business Objects do with Crystal Reports. If Microsoft employees see regressions every time they try to fix something, they are in big trouble? Time to refactor their code base? Maybe. We don't know. We haven't seen the code (at least me). Maybe is it time that we see the code?
Posted by: Diego Vega | November 07, 2005 at 07:17 PM
I agree with all of you. I am happy with VS as it stands now; the product has already been delayed a year and a half. Let's go and move on to Orcas.
Posted by: Wesner Moise | November 07, 2005 at 07:34 PM