Bill Gates launched the combined VSLive!, Microsoft Mobile DevCon, and AVIOS SpeechTEK conferences on Wednesday, March 24, 2004 with his keynote speech to a standing-room-only crowd at San Francisco’s Moscone Center West. The first of the three demos showed new productivity features for VB developers in the Visual Studio .NET 2005 Community Technical Preview (CTP). The CTP is the second preview of the next version of VS.NET, formerly known as “Whidbey,” scheduled for release in the first half of 2005.
Gates’ Visual Studio 2005 Vision
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“Gates went on to describe a live Speech Server application for parents of students in a New York City school district. The app lets families without PCs access children’s academic and related records, which previously required an Internet connection, and avoids adding staff to handle the calls.”
I can think of about a thousand uses for this off the top of my head.
This is part of “Speech Server 2004”. I would imagine this is probably (at least partly) intended as a replacement for Lucents software for companies that are deploying VoIP.
maybe more companies will start using voice replacements for some of the more painful phone trees too.
But when they decided that yearly releases of dev packages is a good thing?
You know what these releases were called before .NET? SERVICE PACKS! You didnt pay for these, you downloaded them.
They are also doing the same thing with the Office line – essentially calling service packs a full blown new version. As a business that uses both these products this is extremely disturbing. I didnt mind paying for these very expensive products for everyone once every 3-4 years.
But now to stay on top of technology we are forced to do this every year? No way, Im just not going to do this.
I dont know what the future holds but I am extremely angered by this blatent effort at increasing release schedules to simply increase profits.
I’m pretty darn happy with VisualStudio.NET 2003; I don’t really see any shortcomings that would encourage me to upgrade, unless the upgrade was insanely cheap.
– chrish
You know what these releases were called before .NET? SERVICE PACKS! You didnt pay for these, you downloaded them.
VS.NET 2005 has far more functionality additions than a service pack for VS6 ever contained.
I dont know what the future holds but I am extremely angered by this blatent effort at increasing release schedules to simply increase profits.
The update from VS.NET 2002 to 2003 was a whole $30! OMG! It broke my bank account!
Why upgrade then if your old product still does the job?
You know what these releases were called before .NET? SERVICE PACKS! You didnt pay for these, you downloaded them.
I don’t remember the VS6 service packs adding any major functionality. They mostly fixed bugs in the program. Furthermore, VS6 had fewer differences for most users from VS5 than VS.Net 2003 did from VS.Net 2002. Now we’re looking at VS.Net 2005, wow, that’s rough, especially after the low cost ($30-50) of the VS.Net 2003 upgrade to address the fact that it came out a year after VS.Net.
They are also doing the same thing with the Office line – essentially calling service packs a full blown new version.
I could understand this as a reference to Office 2000 to Office XP, though they obviously made loading times much better in XP and then added the activation scheme that has kept many people from upgrading beyond 2000. On the other hand, Office 2003 is such a different beast, especially if you consider Outlook and OneNote, but also when considering the XML support and look at the office suite from a developer’s standpoint, that it makes your argument seem either uninformed or a simple troll.
As a business that uses both these products this is extremely disturbing. I didnt mind paying for these very expensive products for everyone once every 3-4 years.
At work I still use VS.Net 2002 and VS6 pretty heavily for maintenance, but I’ve got all 3 installed side-by-side(-by-side). The upgrade on VS.Net 2003 was so minimal that I didn’t even budget it when I upgraded my home license. On the other hand, my work license has been an MSDN Universal license for quite some time, so my employer has gotten more for the money out of the frequent releases. Office 2003 has been a pretty debatable release simply because no one in the office is using it, so any code written specifically for it would probably go to waste, and with the relatively few people running Office XP here, the XML features would go to waste (since Office 2000 can’t really handle it well). At the same time, the Outlook upgrade and possibly OneNote for some people would be really nice to have, and I believe it’s being considered on the upgrade schedule instead of Office XP (the last complete Office upgrade was 2000, done about 2 years ago).
The point is simply that some of these products are expensive, but don’t need to be upgraded on every release, or right away. On the other hand, the VS.Net line has had upgrade prices, so far, that reflect the frequency of release. Not everyone needs every upgrade that comes down the line, and I’m currently writing this in Win2k w/ Office XP installed and VB6 running in the background on a project I’m maintaining (there’s a lot of work that needs to be done before it will run on .Net). Most of the people in this office are running Office 2000 and Win2000, and about 50% of the developers have nothing newer than VS5 or 6, because most of them do maintenance rather than upgrades or new code.
If there’s one drawback to the frequency of VS.Net updates, it’s the fact that I’ll probably get very little use out of VS.Net 2003 at work, simply because I’ll be working on VS.Net 2002 projects and management is a little up tight about moving the projects over to 2003 (afraid something will break, though it shouldn’t).
I think it’s great, too. But after using some other IDEs there are a few features I’d like to see.
Refactoring. Variable refactoring and class refactoring. Yep, I can do these things manually, but the automatic versions save so much time.
JIT Compiling. Not sure if this is possible, but in Eclipse, every time I save, the program is recompiled, and it highlights lines that have problems right away. Very convenient.
There are a few more, but I still definitely prefer VS.NET. I don’t think I have seen any other development software do autocomplete (IntelliSense) as well, which is a critical dev feature for a lazy dev like myself.
Refactoring. Variable refactoring and class refactoring. Yep, I can do these things manually, but the automatic versions save so much time.
I believe this will be included in VS.NET 2005.
Gates’ Visual Studio 2005 Vision
Gates hasn’t written a piece of code in years.
You Linux zealots are so hilarious. The OSS community has yet to offer anything close to Visual Studio 6-level technologies, and all you guys can do is say ridiculous things like “why upgrade if what works does the job” (yeah, right, OSS projects follow a “release eary, release often” schedule of a new point release every friggin’ two weeks) and “Gates hasn’t written a piece of code in years” (as if that at all matters…nonetheless, he’s head of the design team).
If VS.NET 2005 will reduce the number of lines of code a programmer produces by 50%, that means that VS.NET 2005 will probably have at least that many more bugs in it than VS.NET 2003. I’m still using VS.NET 2002 – mostly because we have apps that won’t work with the 1.1 framework. Plus, most of the advances are in areas where a marginal number of applications are being built. Mobile and speech? How about a poll to determine how many production mobile and production speech applications have been deployed/sold. And as for XML web services, they are obviously here to stay, but they are not so great in terms of maxizing performance.