Jeff and .NET

Exactly.

As a related question: Am I the only one who finds it weird that all the MS bloggers here haven't mentioned a single word on this issue? They all babble along as if nothing happened...

Frans - it is obviously (at least from Rizzo's remarks) a marketing decision. What do you expect to hear from the Microsoft bloggers? That is the part of the company that they have no control over, and are probably at odds with themselves.

And Jeff - you're explanation makes it seem like you wish Microsoft hadn't shown what they are working on, because it only frustrates you. My suggestion is that maybe you shouldn't go out seeking the latest info, and just stick to RTM products. That's my strategy with movies - I hate it when friends try to show me "sneak peaks" of a cool movie coming out in a year. I may be anxious about a movie, and I know there is plenty of details available on the internet somewhere, but I choose not to read it. I'll see the movie when it is released.
Are you saying you are working worse, slower, and making less money now that you know what MS has in mind for its future products? If so, stop paying attention. I know plenty of .NET developers that have no idea what is in Whidbey, because they don't go seeking out that information.

Whatever... don't make it my problem. Visual Studio has been broken since the day it was released in terms of Web development. I have an annoying client right now that read about standards compliance and validators and he gets his panties in a bunch because <HR> isn't correct markup, but <hr /> is.

So yeah, I should stop paying attention. That would be a fabulous career move on my part. Good thinking.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that Whidbey can solve your problems today. It can't. Not next week, either. Maybe when it hits Beta 1, but that is NOT today.

According to you? It sure seems to work for me.

What's with everyone telling me what I need?

According to Microsoft, Whidbey is not yet beta quality. According to the presenters at DevDays today, Whidbey is not yet beta quality. I saw 3 versions of Whidbey demonstrated today, all 3 with different feature sets, none with the full set. None working well enough to be considered beta quality. None of them with fully working features (i.e., one build had Whitehorse but it was not fully functional, the presenter explained, mentioned, and pointed out a few features that are almost there or are there but just don't work yet).

If Whidbey works for you, either you have a newer version than any I've seen or heard of, or you're not working it very hard.

Shannon: Within a few weeks the alpha tester group gets new bits of whidbey, we'll see what's true / false of what's working and what's not.

It's definitely not feature complete as new features are still debated in the alpha tester forums, but it gets close. Being not-feature complete means that it is not beta yet. Beta 'quality' means nothing btw. Beta means: feature complete, let the testing begin.

Whitehorse is an add-on to vs.net, not a main part. Whitehorse was barely runnable in the first alpha we saw. But it's March, not October.

No matter what, the pushback of the release date creates a big problem. ASP.NET development IS broken in vs.net 2003, the HTML editor is horrible. It might sound weird, but ASP.NET is the major .NET feature which makes people use .NET in the first place: a lot of websites currently using ASP and for example Oracle are ported to ASP.NET.

If developers have to wait for more than a year before a decent ASP.NET editor is released, what to do? And don't expect a 3rd party editor which solves the problems: any 3rd party editor developer knows that ASP.NET 2.0 totally changes the picture.

As an O/R mapper vendor I should be glad Objectspaces is pushed back for more than a year. In a wicked way I am, but just a little, and for the most part I'm not all that happy with this delay. .NET 2.0 solves a lot of problems and can bring a lot of good things I really need but now I have to wait for a long period of time before I can start updating the code with f.e. generics, true IXmlSerializable support, design time databinding of my objects etc.

Of course, Shannon... I must be imagining things. Thanks for setting me straight.

Jeff - I wasn't trying to make an attack, I don't think my tone came across correctly. I was honestly offering that (ignoring pre-release material) as a valid solution which really does work for a lot of people. I was responding to your specific statement:
"but it's too late, they put them out there for us to see, and now we want it"
That, to me, sounds like you are sorry that you know what they are working on.