Today I’m pleased to announce the availability of Visual Studio .NET 2003 Service Pack 1 (VS .NET 2003 SP1). For those of you unaware of the Service Pack process, the goal is to make sure that we capture and address issues with the released product and make these fixes available to you in a single deliverable. To ensure the continued stability of the product, we publish “hotfixes” and critical security updates as they become available. We also work on additional fixes discovered through broader customer and Microsoft testing. Once we have amassed a range of fixes of broad relevance to the community, we issue a service pack as a one-stop resource.
The announcement of the availability of SP1 for VS 2003 today, and the timing of this release, speaks to the fact that you have told us over time that Visual Studio .NET 2003 has been an extremely stable product. Thank you very much for your continued feedback.
So how have we acted on your feedback? The first Service Pack incorporates hotfixes released since Visual Studio 2003 first shipped, Security Updates, critical fixes and other additional fixes for problems that our Visual Studio team testers have discovered. We’ve also incorporated bugs reported through the MSDN Product Feedback Center and the top 50% of crashes reported by the Windows Error Reporting Service. This amounts to more than 400 issues overall that we have fixed in SP1. The Product Feedback Center and Windows Error Reporting have enabled us to respond more directly to issues that you’ve reported. You can get the Service Pack and related information from the download center page.
I know that some customers are looking for information on when we’ll make the first Service Pack for VS 2005 available. Getting this out to customers is one of our highest priorities as a division. As usual, we are making sure that we take the time to incorporate your feedback and to address the issues of broad relevance to the developer community that you and our internal testing identify before making this available. The quality of this is of paramount importance and we will have more information on this in the next several weeks.
Namaste!