I received an interested suggestion yesterday from Clint Stotesbery.
Clint invited me to vote for a request ( I don't really like the word petition) he posted on the MSDN Feedback Center, the place where usually you submit the bugs you can found in Microsoft products.
This time it's about Visual Studio 2005. More we are clode to the deadline for the final release, more developers are starting to use the Beta 2 provided with a Go Live license.
But the issue now is the product is still far away from being acceptable in a production environment. Don't misundersatnd me I love the new stuff, they are really cool. But I am a web developer and I found too many hurdles in the migration of my existing projects.
Like many, I don't have the time to transform my projects (which are running perfectly as they are) to be acceptable by VS 2005 just to play with some cool new stuff. A lot of things have been done in the new version to please the beginners, but what's about the .Net veterans?
Microsoft communication is quite active, they are really addressing some of the issues. But what they give sounds more like patches done at the last minute to keep their troops happy. No what we want is not a release date its the confirmation that the product will be release without major bugs and no outstanding issues or missing features.
So yes I voted for this request because I know that I will use VS 2005 for the next 3 to 4 years and I know that sadly only a couple of patches have been released by Microsoft for .Net v1 bugs and I don't want the same story happening again.
So if you are planning to use Visual Studio 2005 tomorrow or in the next year, this is probably your last chance to get your voice heard.
Go to this site, read the comment, have an opinion and hopefully vote. We need an important number of votes to be on top of the requests, and believe me Microsoft is listening.