Join the Windows XP club... for 5 more years or so

If you’re a developer today writing .NET apps, you’re either writing them with Visual Studio 2003 or 2005. I don’t know what the actual numbers are out there, but for those writing apps with VS2003, forget about developing on Windows Vista when it ships. You won’t be able to run your precious IDE. Visual Studio 2003 is not supported on Vista. Does it mean it wont run? Maybe, I’m not sure, but the “official” word (and what’s flying around the blog-o-sphere these days) is that it won’t be supported. Also if you’re running VS2005, you’ll need to install SP1 (which just went public recently).

To me this means I’ll be running Windows XP for another 5 years until the next OS comes along. It works, the kinks are pretty much out of it now, all my hardware works with it, and I can develop apps using VS2005 and 2003 along with .NET 3.0 (God, I still hate that name) on it. I’m sure MS will at least consider correcting this (especially since almost every feed I read is discussing this problem). I mean, how freakin’ hard is it to support 2003 on the Vista Platform? Don’t answer that, and I swear I’ll ostracise the next blogger who uses “first-class” with anything and Microsoft, that saying is getting so overused.

Is Visual Studio 2003 really that “legacy”?

What really kills me about all this, is that your good old VB6 IDE will run fine and be supported. VB6! I thought we killed that thing off when we had the chance. While I understand Microsoft is focusing their efforts on supporting VS2005, I would think you generally have a few good brain cells to know that most people haven’t switched over/upgraded yet and it’s not going to happen overnight for some (most?) apps. So why wouldn’t you support the masses?

Or am I that out of tune with the universe and everyone has silently moved to VS2005 and this isn’t an issue.

If that’s the case, why is everyone blogging  about this?

4 Comments

  • Totally agree! If developers don't use Vista then why would our clients do!

  • Because clients don't care what platform we develop on, as long as it *works*.

    I think everyone is blowing this out of proportion.

    I also think we need to take a collective deep breath and just sit tight and wait and see what happens. MS has already (recently) been shown to listen to what people are saying regarding their products, so it wouldn't surprise me to see something happen.

    Oh, and "how freakin' hard is it to support 2003 on the Vista Platform?".... why don't you tell us all how freakin' easy it is.

  • Agreed; especially for those of us who have no immediate plans to migrate to Office 2007 and plan to continue development for CMS 2002 and SharePoint Server 2003--both VS2003-based products. I hope to never reach a point where I'm either developing in a virtual environment or using two boxes. =/

  • Although I have started using VS 2005 back in january and have been using it since but Still hate the fact that vista is not supporting VS 2003. I dont know how many other application(Other than Microsoft's) will not be supported in VISTA. Now all of a sudden I am not feeling any happy or excited about VISTA. Microsoft are trying to hurt themselves by removing this support. I know hundereds of developer working on vs 2003 and really having no plan to move to the ledder until a new project comes in

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