Microsoft has just saved thousands of development companies lots of money. For the wrong reason. In his latest post, MS Corporate VP S. Somasegar announces the first beta release of service pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 - which is nice - and the extent of MS support for Visual Studio in Vista. And here’s the kicker.
MS will support Visual Studio 2005 SP1 and Visual Basic 6.0 ONLY on Vista. So then, unless you’re already developing .NET 3.0 apps for Vista, what the hell is the point of switching to Vista? Aside from it looks nicer than XP. I need to run VS2003 to support already written apps regardless of the fact I have VS2005. And even if I did have the time to upgrade them all to VS2005 projects, Somasegar also points out that there will be compatibility issues with VS2005 SP1 anyway. So why release it now? We’re developers - we know how to patch our own machines. Can’t SP1 wait until it will cure compatibility too? Grrr.