RSSMicrosoft Talks Up Visual Studio Future
By Nate Mook | Published November 9, 2005, 4:05 PM
Microsoft may have just shipped Visual Studio 2005, but the company is already starting to discuss its future plans for the development suite. Service Pack 1 is in the works for next summer, says Visual C# product manager Scott Wiltamuth, and Orcas -- the next VS release -- is being hashed out.
The first service pack for the older Visual Studio 2003 will also ship in the first half of next year, with Wiltamuth estimating an April release. Soma Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division, echoed those timeframes, saying the company would provide hotfixes in the interim.
"My current thinking is that we will target the first service pack for Visual Studio 2005 around summer next year," Somasegar wrote on his Web log. "As we get more mileage on the product usage in your production environment and get your feedback, we will firm up our plans here."
But Visual Studio 2005, known by its code-name "Whidbey," still has some work ahead despite officially launching this week at a special event in San Francisco. International versions of the product are currently being completed, and the Team Foundation Server component won't be ready until the first quarter of 2006.
Acknowledging that Microsoft took too long getting Whidbey out the door, Somasegar says his division will now embark on a 3-4 month-long milestone known as "MQ" that will attempt to fix those development problems.
"MQ is a milestone that is post-Whidbey and pre-Orcas that will focus on quality," explained C# team member Eric Malno. "We have learned a lot from the previous 3 versions of Visual Studio that were built around the .NET Framework, the biggest lesson that we learned on this most recent version was that we were not agile enough and we took too long to ship."
Malno added, however, that "MQ is not about servicing Whidbey. The MQ milestone is about changing processes and making improvements on these processes. It is NOT about code churn, adding features, or fixing known bugs in VS2005."
After MQ, Orcas will begin to swim. "Orcas is all about enabling platform adoption for Windows Vista, for Office 12 and for WinFX," says Somasegar. "You can use Whidbey today to build Vista applications, for example. But Orcas will make it a whole lot easier for people to build Vista applications through easy to use designers and the like."
In a growing trend at the once-secretive company, Microsoft will boost transparency during the development of Orcas. The company will share specific feature plans and request feedback from customers before details are set into stone.
Somasegar also says his division will begin work on a number of incubation experiments -- a concept that has become a veritable requirement within MSN and Microsoft search rival Google.
"In light of the 'Live' announcements last week, we are starting to think about what it means for us in the Developer world," he explained. "There are two things that we need to think about -- the kind of tools support that we need to provide for our 'Live' services platform and what does 'Visual Studio Live' look like."
If they have already found enough bugs to be talking about a service pack why the heck wasn't the release delayed until they were fixed????
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|Who said service packs were about bugs? Read the article.
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|cowgaR said "So at least in WebDevelopment MS has achieved true win upon its opponents(you can't compare PHP here, really).
VS2005+SQL2005+ASP.NET 2.0 == unmatched power."
Yes you are correct. You cant compare a compiler suite, database server and script language with just a script language, what is your point smart guy? And asp never was 'unmatched power', you just made me spill my coffe!
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|Sorry for the cofee :-)
I compared PHP to ASP.NET2(you can't compare, ASP.NET2 beats PHP very hard) , the last '+' sentence is just summarization of what is avaiable and when you use it it rocks :-)
You know, when someone mention PHP it automatically goes with MySQL database(which PHP supports the best and in 90% of projects) or some PostgreSQL.
But if you wan't it that way, MySQL is just a toy compared to SQL2005 express(Postgre is good), and it is also not 'real' free like SQL2005EE. PostgreSQL is very good, but the tools for PHP are simply silly compared to what you can get developing ASP.NET. It is because ASP.NET is event component driven development model with today's one of best langage C#.20, whereas PHP is just scripts...
I didn't want to start flame but I just obviously did.
ASP was never unmatched power, you are right. But this is ASP.NET. And it is in version 2 today, check it out, it is really much much better than version 1.x, which was lacking soooo many things. Together with C#2.0 specification you simply get some awesome and never before seen web development pleasure. And ATLAS will only push it higher.
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|Actually, I do a lot of both... I've been using VS 2005 since pre-Beta 1, and yes, it's a great product.
But really... I've used MSSQL for PHP, and it works great. It's not really any harder to use MSSQL than MySQL in PHP. You can use the PEAR DB's to access either, use the direct API's, or write your own database abstraction layer.
On the flip side... I've used MySQL with VS 2005 as well. It's not *AS* easy as MSSQL, but they are getting there...slowly. And it works.
PHP is a pretty good language, and it does support classes and shares many OOP-like features. It *COULD* have a nice framework like ASP.NET does where everything appears to be event driven (As much as ASP.NET is), but it doesn't yet. The IDE's aren't anywhere in the same ballpark either, but I've heard great things about PHP in VS 2003 (intellisense, etc). Dreamweaver 8 for PHP is OK, but it's still years behind VS, but it too is "getting there".
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|You are generaly right withnail about ORCAS will be the right cream that will enhance developing rich-client applications, and that current VS2005 does not seem so progressive and *new* to have some reason to buy it and jump to still-not-popular-.NET development. But many ppl aren't exactly *buying* VS, they are simply *getting* it with MSDN subscriptions, so that was a save for MS that it shipped many new products at once(although VS being a little late).
Despite public belief I tell you - .NET2.0 is one awesome tech, and if you won't go for winforms(can't imagine why, MFC is on big mess), for ASP2.0 you won't find any tool matching VS2005 power. So we can have WinFX soon which renders WinForms2.0 developing obsolete(ehm), but ASP.20 won't disapear so soon. It is one brilliant technology only expecting boost in future(Atlas(ajax)).
So at least in WebDevelopment MS has achieved true win upon its opponents(you can't compare PHP here, really).
VS2005+SQL2005+ASP.NET 2.0 == unmatched power.
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|Though generally not a Microsoft fan, I have used the Beta version of Whidbey and found it to be an excellent IDE.
However, in light of WinFX, one can't help but think that the delay in its release renders it obsolete almost as soon as it has become available.
It's hard to commit to developing something using the old WinForms paradigm when WinFX is just around the corner and promises to be so much better. This is truly unfortunate because with the release of Whidbey, we have finally seen the release of a WinForms development environment that is very usable and effective.
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|It sure would be interesting to see group code update live...
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