DevDiv Servicing Team Blog

This is a great addition to the VS environment - don't forget the x64 development community in your work.

Dasher, thank you for the comment. You can find more information about the x64 (and IA64) work we've done for Visual Studio so far at http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/search.aspx?q=x64.

Having to wait till Q3 for VS 2005 SP1 is a long time to deal with some extremely bad bugs in Visual Studio. I hope some hotfixes come out shortly for the VB background compiler crash problem as well as debugging issues that are prevelant.

When talking to developers using Visual Studio 2005 for more than 6 months I got lots of feedback,...

Good day,

We have developed in house a software for internal usage using Oracle forms 6.0.8.22.1 and which is connected to a back-end oracle 9i database . We are using Oracle report builder 6.0.8.22.0 for reporting. We want to move to .Net technology and standardize our application and to be implemented in our branches. What front-end .Net tool and reporting one do you recommend and what is the recommended platform to be run on? Appreciate your support

Really appriciate the effort to come out with an open plan. A lot of us have been awaiting offical news on the SP releases and this site keeps aside the rumors and makes MS effort very clear. Thanks!

I've been developping a small shop management application using vs2005 vb.net and SSE. I often have freezes of VS2005. An icon appears telling VS is busy, just tried once to let it finish by its self but after a night VS was still busy. Deleting or copying a few thousand records from the embedded DB freezes up VS. Yesterday I found out about the way IIF() is evaluated the hard way. But then again when setting a breakpoint VS frooze. A day coding means rebooting 4 times at least. I have a dedicated laptop for coding. Its an Acer 1711smi WinXP pro, all patches and stuff, VS, Office, HP printer stuff, fire fox, no other progs.

I'm wondering if VS2005 was ready to be released? I even haven't mentionned the things that need a restart of VS or the errors in generated code. I'm kind of a newbie in VS so what will it be when I try more complicated stuff? Why do we MSDN subs have to wait that long for our product to work the way it should? MS didn't wait for VS2005 to be OK to send me my yearly $1900 bill even though it was the main reason why I took a subscription.

Should these fixes not be on the list ? :
910832 - FIX The IDE stops responding when you modify C# code in Visual Studio 2005

and

912019 - FIX You may receive an error message when you rebuild a solution and try to view a Windows Form in Design view in Visual Studio 2005

I have a major problem with VS 2005. I have a Vb application that was originally written in VS 7.1 and migrated to VS 8.0.5. It has WinForm with a TabControl. Each Tab provide a full screen page with other WinForm Controls on it like Command Buttons, Labels, Radio Buttons and the like. Periodically the Tab Pages will appear in Design mode but all of the WinForm Control on the Tab Page are not visible. They are not deleted, just not visible. The Visible property is still set to true, but I can not see the controls. If I use the Properties page to select a control, an empty select rectangle will show up. The only way to get the control back is to exit VS and restart it. It is difficult to work with the forms without the control Visble. What is happening? Why do the controls dissapear? How do I fix this?

ismail, the .NET Framework itself doesn't ship with any reporting functionality but does, of course, include a rich set of classes you can use to write your own.

Solutions do exist, however. SQL Server Reporting services with third-party connectors can generate reports from other data sources such as Oracle. See http://www.microsoft.com/sql/reporting/partners/softwareapps.asp for details.

As you can see from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/products/compare/default.aspx both Visual Studio 2005 Professional and Visual Studio 2005 Team System ship with Crystal Reports, which can also be installed as a third-party add-in if you buy the complete Crystal Reports package.

There are a lot of other reporting solutions available on the market for the .NET Framework but we can't recommend one to you, although I'm sure we'd appreciate you using SQL Server Reporting services. It's integration with Visual Studio is very tight.

As far as what platforms it's recommended using an NT-based platform, which is NT4, 2000, XP and all future Windows versions. Windows 95, 98, and Me are not high-throughput platforms and don't natively support Unicode so a lot of features run even slow since strings often have to be thunked and marshaled and that takes time. As you can see from http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeselect, Windows 95 and 98 are already no longer supported and Windows Me goes out of support in June of this year.

Generally for server products we recommend running on a server platform, especially a platform with great security enhancements and performance like Windows Server 2003 for x64.

I think this portal is a GREAT idea and look forward to announcements regarding bug fixes, etc. I think if we would have had this with previous IDE releases it would have made finding fixes and updates much easier than having to Google and dig through waves of KB's, etc...

i would love to see an rss feed for:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/servicing/default.aspx

This is the usual way i use such announcement websites

regards

Visual Studio 2005 - awesome feature set, well worth the upgrade, however, I have to qualify this with the simple statement of fact - it performs abysmally, often seemingly hanging for several minutes and crashes frequently - Q3 is too long to wait for a service pack - please release some hot fixes.

to Kristof and Andy Maggs,
as regards to performance, I am using Visual Studio 2005 with SQL 2005 Developer Edition on a 2 year old desktop. Desktop didn't perform well until I gave it over 2GB ram. Is there a connection?

Please, please can you release a hotfix for the vs2005 VB compiler crash. It is really annoying!

I would also ask for SP1 sooner than Q3.

A quicker and more focused release should deal with making Visual Studio 2005 stable. The project template features are a great technology adoption accelerator but has problems.

By getting project templates working sooner the community could learn/test/harden the rest of .NET that much sooner.

Also thanks tons for the great 'service status' (servicing) site. It should bond the community and the dev team in a good way.

Shawnk, what project template features do you think have problems and what are the problems? I'd like to see if I can help sort them out.

I've just been looking for a KB article on the VB 2005 compiler problems and can't find it. Is it that you aren't aware of the problem, or just haven't issued a KB article yet?

When can we expect a hotfix for this problem?

[Background: I'm using mixed VB and C# for a large-ish project using WinForms. Relatively often I get a crash dialog informing me that the vb compiler has faulted and I should restart VS. When this happens it often causes a cascade of errors that can take as much as 2 minutes to cancel my way through. Restarting does help in the short term.]

     dear sir,
           This is narasimha i having problem to load tree view and tab control in asp.net .In new version any advanced controles for these controls
Regards,
Narasimha

Microsoft has published a hotfix for the Visual Basic 2005 Compiler to correct an obscure issue that was observed by members of the community. The symptoms vary, but the crash can be most easily identified by the error string, Visual Basic compiler is unable to recover from the following error: System Error &H8013141e& Save your work and restart Visual Studio." It generally occurs shortly after quitting debugging.

To obtain the fix:

Call the Microsoft Developer Support Line ((800) 936-5800)
Request that the technical router transfer you to Developer Support  Visual Basic
Refer to KB 915038

This hotfix is only available via Microsoft Support.

A big thanks goes out to the community for identifying this issue, being incredibly cooperative in helping us nail it down, and validating the fix.  We would not have been able to address this issue if it werent for community involvement.

Stephen, Lead Release PM for VS and .NET Framework servicing

Hello,

Some of the bugs you are interested in seeing fixed may be on the MSDN Product Feedback Center (PFC) (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/).  We will announce which product feedback center bugs are included in Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 through each bug’s PFC description.  You will see comments arrive as we mark bugs for inclusion.  You can receive a notification about the inclusion of a specific bug by adding it to your tracking list.  To add a bug to your tracking list, search for it in the product feedback center and then click ‘Add’ beneath ‘My Tracking List’.  Please continue to give feedback as we are returning to the bugs and suggestions throughout the construction of this service pack and the next versions of Visual Studio and .NET.

-Keen, PM - Product Feedback Center

I am having a great deal of problems installing my new MS Visual Studio 2005.  Every time I try to do it, it comes up with the following: could not start the installer...and...could not start Visual Studios 2005. Then, it throws me to the error (I think its 1603) and asks me if I want to report it.

I really need Visual Studio. Please help.

Whats the deal with VS2005 seeming to just stop everything for a few seconds.  It seems to happen all the time especially when switching between toolboxes.  The larger the project, the worse the problem is.  Any hotfixes on the horizon for this?

i'm not sure if it's the right place to post my problem.

After installing VS 2005 BetaVersion, i'm unable to open the program, it tells me

"The beta period has expired. Thank you for participanting in our beta program.
You can now safely remove Microsoft Development Environment from your computer"

I haven't even use the program nor install it on other machine before. If there's a expiry date, it should have alarmed me during the long installation.

Any clues? Thanks.

Faith,

The release version has been out since 11/7, and I believe all beta versions expired as of 1/1/2006.  You can get new trial versions here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/trial/

1) “Q2 2006 for VS2003 SP1″ is way too vague considering it is already “Q1 2006″. You should be able to narrow it down to a 2-week window when the date is only a month or two away.

2) Making us wait until “Q2 2006″ for SP1 of Visual Studio 2003 is simply outrageous! THREE YEARS !!!!

3) Why must we have to “contact by phone or email” to get hotfixes? This is madness and a total waste of our time. Why not just have a list of available hot-fixes, and some big disclaimer that they’re not well tested. This is NOT a consumer tool. You’re dealing with developers here.
They know what “untested” is, and have made the decision that “untested” is better than dealing with the bug.

If you want to know why people are moving over to open source, ultra-frustrating policies like these are one big reason.

This is also why I let my MSDN subscription expire. Exactly what was I paying a "subscription" for? What I was expecting was "VS 2003 service pack1" to show up in the mail. Instead I have a stack of DVDs about a foot high all without a service pack or hotfixes.  

Warren Stevens

ErikE, the fixes that will be included in Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 are defined by the bar found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/servicing/sp1_vs05/default.aspx.

While there may be some exceptions to that bar, you can rest assured that we are making every effort to meet the published bar, incorporating all fixes meeting the bar in Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1.

In the case of the two hotfixes mentioned in your post, these both will fall under the first bullet in the bar ("The Hotfixes and General Distribution Release Updates (GDRs) released between RTM and the end of the Service Pack customer Beta period") and are therefore strong candidates for inclusion in Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1.

Thanks for your feedback.

-Blair - Program Manager - VS and .NET Framework Servicing

Microsoft is committed to making customers successful with Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.  As part of this continuing effort, we are now announcing our target date to release the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Beta this month, (March, 2006) and we also have an estimated RTM release targeted for June 2006.

At Microsoft, our Service Packs are broadly defined as a cumulative set of all Hotfixes, security updates, critical and other updates, as well as additional fixes for problems found by Microsoft testers since the release of the product. Service packs may also contain a limited number of customer-requested design changes to features.  

We encourage all interested parties to sign up to participate in the Beta.  You will have the opportunity to use our pre-release product and notify us of any bugs you may discover.  You may apply for the Beta by going to http://connect.microsoft.com and signing up under “Available Programs”.

Release Schedule:    (these are estimated dates)
Beta Release        3/24/2006
RTM                        6/1/2006

Lee - Program Manager - Visual Studio .NET 2003 Service Pack 1

Please, I will like to send this to express my appreciation for the nice and the great step by step info about your Visual Studio Software. Your explanation has helped me a lot for the computer Science course I am taking.

I will like to know how I can download MS Visual Studio .Net Multi-language Compiler 2005, and MS Visual Studio Mult-language Compiler Version 6.

Thank you for your corperation.

Joseph  

Robert, the first thing that I always do when having software problems is to use the web: Do a search on the exact error message(s) I'm seeing. In this case, I don't come up with anything for the error messages that you posted above, but I do find a KB article describing a similar error message "Windows Installer Service could not be accessed." Is this the message you're getting? If so, try KB319624 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319624).

That said, I really should emphasize that this blog is not a forum for technical support. MSDN Forums (http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn) and Microsoft CSS are outstanding resources for technical questions. Typically, you're first few incidents for each purchased product are no charge when you call Microsoft CSS. Also, the MSDN Product Feedback Center (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback) is a great place for customers to file product bugs.

Good luck!
-Blair.

Thanks for the more precise release date for VS 2003 SP1.

I am a bit nervous about upgrading to VS 2005 due to all the issues found here and elsewhere on the web. At the same time I appreciate all your hard work and hope that these service packs will address some of the stability issues with Visual Studio.

There's nothing more frustrating than slow & buggy IDEs.

Cheers,

-Daniel.

It just dawned on me.  With the release of Vista towards the end of this year, what is MS timetable for releasing Orcas (VS 2007 presumably)?  I know most of the development technologies are available for VS2005 in the form of CTP's, but I am curious as to potential release timetables for new VS.

Thanx,

Robert

Software Updates for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework are always in the works, now we can follow...

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