More thoughts about moving forward

We're getting close to releasing version 6.2 of DXperience and the .NET component sets (if you're a DXperience customer, you can already download the beta from the Client Center). Of course, as we drive to fix the last bugs and polish the last paint method, we're thinking ahead to version 6.3, some 4 months away (we're sticking to a schedule of 3 major releases every year and if we get good at it, next year we'll manage 4), and what should be in it.

My post yesterday stirred some discussion within our .NET component teams, as well as among our customers. It seems that Visual Studio 2002 (VS2002) is rapidly becoming the black sheep of the Visual Studio family: the component teams are saying that their coding and testing time is increased when VS2002 is factored in.

Well, duh, say I, of course it is, it's an extra IDE to test. Hello? And then I'm led by the hand into the shadowy world of serialization issues, designer differences, undo problems, etc.

I wonder how many of you, gentle readers, actually still use VS2002. I'm willing to bet it's a very small proportion. Then, of course, I wonder how many are using VS2003, and, if you are, what your timetable is for moving to VS2005. Or even better, whether your timetable decrees jumping straight to Orcas (Visual Studio 2007), leapfrogging VS2005 (after all, .NET Framework 1.1 is becoming fairly ubiquitous, whereas version 2.0 is still ramping up). And, of course, I wonder how many people are using VS2005.

Questions, questions.

My thinking at the moment is closing in on making our current major versions (or the ones about to be released) across the product line the last ones to support VS2002. We certainly can't drop .NET 1.1 and VS2003 support because I sense that there are a lot of people out there who have significant code bases for .NET 1.1 and hence are still using VS2003. The only exception to this rule is ASP.NET, where ASP.NET 2.0 is so much better than 1.1 that you should be using it right now for your web applications (and our new ASP.NET controls are ASP.NET 2.0 only).

Comments?

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