Orcas, SilverLight, .Net 3.5, ASP.NET Futures etc... hmmm can we pause a bit?

I wrote two or three years ago about the avalanche of announcements regarding VS 2005 and all the things coming with it like .NET 2.0.

I like new stuff, but Microsoft, is it possible to pause a bit with all the new stuff?

I am in 2007 just starting to get my head in full production with VS 2005, and now I read everywhere all the good things about Orcas, the new version. Great, but what's about the lot of bugs and usability issues still standing in the current Visual Studio version?

I wonder if the rush to do more new things is not also to hide the fact that Microsoft has no more time to debug and fix its own products.

One example I want to see fix now: the error management in VS 2005 is really useless. I don't understand why I can't have a full list of ALL the errors in my web project, not just about the opened files. I really like as it was in VS 2003.

Also even if VS 2005 is faster, it crash too often.

So happy to see Orcas, but Microsoft can you talk about the next service pack?

It's also for me a premiere to see Microsoft reasing in the wilderness an Alpha version of a product, Silverlight?

I already have people asking me to build stuff with Silverlight, because of the huge coverage on the product! I am not asking for Microsoft to close the doors, but I would like to see a bit of order in their announcements.

 

 

 

8 Comments

  • I am the only one to find funny that they have both Silverlight 1.0 beta and Silverlight 1.1 alpha available at the same time without any stable version released yet?

  • I propose an Strike, most of us think the same, orcas is nice also support 2.0, 3.0 3.5 (off course) but I AM STILL using 1.1, and the reason of that is not all of our employers got the amount of cash as Microsoft and also for a big application that migration means to spend £2m or more, so let stand up from our computers and don't code any more until MS stop for three year

    PS. I am doing MCPD (time and money) and I don't know if it's worthy, What do you think.

  • Releasing an alpha of a 1.1 the same time as the beta of a 1.0 strikes me as unadulterated insanity.

  • I agree totally.

    Customers and I are totally confused about what is usable and what is beta.

    There are too many version combinations of Windows XP, Vista, Orcas, Ajax, .Net framework, SilverLight, Visual Studio, etc. to understand what can be used to produce a working product.

  • Yeah I'm still in the 2005 world as well. Reloading an OS and 2005 as we speak. Not even thinking about V.Next yet.

  • We just migrated from 1.1 to 2.0 six months back, but got news that framework 3.0 has been released, then we got news of 3.5, Expression Web, Expression Blend and now Silver Light, wondering whats next and will it pause at certain point and time or continue in such way. We were expecting of VS2005-SP1 but don't know when will we get it.

  • Hello,

    ASP, ASP.NET 1, ASP.NET 2, ASP.NET 3.0, AJAX ...,

    I'm thinking about when the microsoft can work out a final version? Every 6 month MS is changing technology. This is not good for developers. I think Microsoft is using all web developers to test their different technologies!!!

  • What's with all the whining? Orcas will be released in 2008 - that's a 3 year development cycle people! How long should we wait between major revisions? 5 years?? If that was the case, I can tell you right now I'd stop my $3,500 / yr MSDN subscription today.

    ASP.NET / ViewState / Web Forms are now really outdated. Working in ASP.NET consists in 20% time spent on working around the Page model, optimizing ViewState etc... Themes were a good idea, but the current implementation is half broken (all CSS files get attached to every request?!). Web Parts that require full postbacks seem now totally unusable compared to things like Windows Live / Google / Yahoo dashboards. This needs to change.

    MS needs Ajax support and better designer-focused IDEs to compete in the web application market place. And they need an alternative to Flex for rich UI. Finding talented ASP.NET programmers is hard enough, but with new frameworks like RoR simplify everybody's jobs, it's going to get more and more difficult unless ASP.NET improves dramatically.

    Same thing with ADO.NET. The DataSet model is just so 10 years ago. Today's modern frameworks rely on O/R mappers, dynamic languages etc..., which will be part of the .Net 3.0 framework. LINQ looks awesome.

    And .Net 3.0 is what's inside Vista - what would be the point of releasing a new OS if the IDE doesn't work with it?

    ASP.Net 1.0 / 1.1 -> 2001 - 2003
    ASP.Net 2.0 -> 2005
    ASP.Net 3.0 -> 2006
    ASP.Net 3.5 -> 2008

    Not exactly every 6 months. And 2.0 / 3.0 are really the same, except for new libraries to support WPF, WCF and WWF. Other than that, no change.

    So while I agree VS 2005 needs SP2 really bad, I don't understand all the whining about Orcas...

Comments have been disabled for this content.