Friday, November 4, 2005

Hey, Shareholders! VS 2005 is *Fantastic* and our Developers Love Microsoft!

Are you in the Seattle area as of Wednesday the ninth? Well, there's a little shindig in Bellevue that all the Microsoft shareholder cool-cats are invited to. More info at: http://www.microsoft.com/msft/SEC/FY05/proxy2005.mspx . Note that there will be an audio web cast that you can find off of http://www.microsoft.com/msft/ - put that reminder in your calendar. I hope to get a post up for people to share their reactions.

Maybe next year I can be more organized to print up my own little pamphlet of MSFT Common Sense to hand out for the arriving attendees (you know, one with the share price graphed on the front).

One topic that would be in there for this year: does it make sense to ship a product that your own customers are telling you, "No! Please don't ship it yet! Please make it more stable and performant! Please, for the sake of all that's holy, take your time!" Sorry, customers, here it comes!

How has reaction been to Visual Studio 2005 so far this week? Here's a sample of six:

1) Roy Osherove: My first real frustration with VS 2005 RTM. Good flow of comments. Snippet from the post:

It's completely amazing to me that VS.NET 2005 RTM, after a big cycle of testing, alphas, betas and LOTS of community feedback, can be this buggy.

2) Anatoly Lubarsky: Visual Studio 2005 RTM: bugs and backward compatibility

3) Wesner Moise: VS 2005 Bugs.

4) Frans Bouma: VS.NET 2005 C# : IDE hang with simply code... with a set of comments, including from a Microsoftie:

I am Suma from C# IDE team. I could repro this on RTM version of Visual Studio Team System too. This is a known issue that got reported by a customer via MSDN feedback center (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewFeedback.aspx?feedbackid=b813ccd7-b714-4dc4-9e24-3f8ecc4527e4) and given the late state of the product cycle, we had to postpone the bug.

5) Ayende Rahein: Visual Studio 2005 RTM: Buggy, Buggy, Buggy. Snippet:

I think that it's imperative that the tools we're using to help us develop will actually.. well, help us develop. If I find myself working in spite of a tool, I'll look elsewhere to something that will replace it. Until now, VS was the crowned king of the .Net IDEs, but with those problems, it's possible for a competitor to show up and turn the tables on Microsoft.

6) Michael Teper: Find All References is Too Slow bug report. Reactivated.

This is integrated innovation loaded into the cylinder and blowing a big hole in Microsoft's foot. Because so much was tied to VS 2005 and CLR 2.0 it had to be shipped now, ready or not. Has all of this been shoved out of the door in order for SteveB to be rushing straight from the launch celebration and into the shareholder's meeting?

I might wander in early on Monday to meander through the crowds celebrating the big Visual Studio launch. But my heart is heavy that we shoveled what we could together and Won't Fix-ed this release out the door. Microsoft has just opened a very big door to competition in the IDE space. Or at least towards people jealously holding onto VS 2003 and saying, "CLR 2.0? Screw that! The last time I tried to use generics my machine locked up!" Big freakin' mistake. Microsoft should be ashamed.

And shareholders should be pissed off. Do the shareholders know any better? Are they going to wander into the Meydenbauer center on Wednesday clued into the fact that our developers developers developers have just been screwed screwed screwed and the first thing out of our innovation pipeline has so far landed with a wet thud? Zero common sense.

If you can't trust your compiler, man, your whole world starts falling apart. All of you Microsofties posting "whoo-hoo, we shipped!" to your blog I hope are going in next week and, after the cheering, put deep concerted effort into creating a near-term service pack for VS. I know we wander around joking that Orcas will really big a big service pack for VS 2005, but as of this week, no one is laughing. Our customers - our developers - deserve a lot better quality and we need to react quickly to avoid a deepening distrust.

I'll be keeping an eye out for further VS 2005 problems. If you find any other interesting reports, please add them to the comments here.

(A big iterative tip of the hat to the mixmaster sending me Roy Osherove's link and the core thesis for this post.)

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