Why don't we see any patches for Visual Studio .NET? (2002, 2003, 2005...)

Frans has mentioned this on numerous occasions I believe, and this topic has reared its ugly head once again. Dan Fernandez' post back in March 2004, doesn't really address the reasoning behind it.

Personally, I really don't see the difficulty for Microsoft in releasing publicly available patches or hotfixes for VS.NET. It happens for the .NET framework, all OS'es and Office products, why not for VS.NET?

At the lowest level, it's only shuffling around a few bits and bytes for the affected binary files. Even with the different VS.NET product versions, they could release a patch for each version if needs be.

Anyone care to comment on the reasoning behind this?

6 Comments

  • You would think after going through all the trouble of adding check for Visual Studio updates to the IDE and installer, that something would be available there regularly. From the outside looking in, that team seems to be having really significant problems.

  • Patrice, in the bug report you point out, it also mentions:



    "Until we can get this problem corrected in a future release..."



    and



    "...We'll work to fix this one in a future release/service-pack of Visual Studio."



    Doesn't sound to me like this service pack is a sure thing.

  • Because they are very stable products!!! I say this because in my experience I can compare them to the IBM Websphere RAD 6.0 which is riddled with bugs that they come up of patches almost every month or even within. Visual studio has version 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 etc. but RAD has like 6.0.0.1, 6.0.1.x,etc. Sometimes I wonder if they really have a beta program at all! (RAD is bad!)

  • To stay informed about servicing plans around Visual Studio, please check in regularly to the team blog linked to above. My team deals with transparency, developer aftermarket community solutions, and servicing for .NET and Visual Studio. We have plans in place to become more transparent about our servicing policy and will be using the blog to communicate those plans.

  • Does anyone know how to use Visual Studio 2002 to compile under framework 1.1 or 2.0?



    Thanks



    Nicolas

  • 429507.. Corking :)

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