life in a smart mob

Personally it can't come soon enough. There is a problem with some of the speculation and moving deadlines, for example would your company look at buying a new Source Control system knowing that Team System is just around the corner - how about investing in developing a page template system knowing that Master pages for ASP.NET 2.0 is just around the corner?
Micorosft has to take some of the blame for this - for instance having an entire MSDN Magazine dedicated to a system with no firm release date and no way to legally use it in commercial operation is pushing it to say the least...

"My view on this has always been, let get it right (or as right as is possible) first time rather repeated releases and upgrades. There has been enough criticism in the past of rushed releases that require multiple patches."
1) this is the 3rd release for VS.NET, not the first.
2) Whidbey will be released 3 years after vs.net 2002 (at least).
3) VS.NET 2003 is released as the service pack for vs.net 2002 (as the promised service pack for VS.net 2002 never came). It didn't fix a lot of irritating bugs
4) It's been more than a year since VS.NET 2003 saw the light. Still, there is not a single patch released to the public to address a bug, just through PSS. You probably don't realize this, but not having patches for .NET and VS.NET is pretty bad. Especially after more than a year!
5) Some bugs, like the ASP.NET editor's reformating crap and other bugs, are not fixed before whidbey (official statement). That means that if whidbey is delayed, the bugfixes are delayed too.

If MS actually DOES release patches, which it doesn't, it wouldn't have been a problem.

I totally agree with you Steven... I think that Whidbey must be well tested before a release, we can't patch it every day. Obviously, the new Framework 2.0 is really interesting and maybe a programmer would like to use it as soon as possible, but you can do it also without Whidbey. Whidbey must be a powerful environment and when it will be out it must be ready to work without problems.

I do agree with Frans, VS.NET 2003 - a totally business critical app - has had no appreciable service releases at all (I don't count the HotFixes for 'code killing'). I have no other application on machine for which this is true - office is patched every other month - but only VS.NET 2003 crashes or freezes 4-5 times a day.

Incidentally, I'm writing this whilst waiting for an ASP file to save...3 minutes and counting :-(

^_^,Pretty Good!