Getting Help with Visual Studio

bretgrinslade — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 18:42:00 GMT

Most developers have heard that Visual Studio and the .NET Framework released Beta2 of Orcas at the end of July.

However, I have seen a few questions on how to get help or report issues.

"Help! I can't figure out this bug or VS won't install!"

First, the MSDN or ASP.NET forums are a good place to discuss issues. Remember this is COMMUNITY and not a support center. Good behavior here is to post issues and questions, respond to other people if you can help, and not use this for mission critical stuff!

MSDN Forums (all): http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/default.aspx?SiteID=1

MSDN Orcas: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=153&SiteID=1

ASP.NET Forums http://forums.asp.net/

There is also Microsoft Connect. This is more for filing bugs or reporting issues.

http://connect.microsoft.com/

Of course, search is a good way to find issues that folks already are discussing. Be a bit on guard here. I often see posts were a person thinks they have one issue and it has a very different root cause. Try to be sure the issue is actually the same before making to much investment in the work arounds or fixes... especially if they mean doing things like hacking the registry, etc.

Finally, for VS and NETFX setup, Aaron Stebner maintains on of the best blogs going on issue. I almost always check his blog before I post (and I work on the VS and NETFX deployment technology team!)

http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/

Have fun with VS and NETFX 3.5! -Bret

Software & Services Bret Grinslade : reporting bugs to microsoft

Getting Help with Visual Studio