Planning for Orcas

I've been spending a lot of my time recently planning for the next version of Visual Studio, codenamed Orcas.  Orcas will be the first version of Visual Studio released after Windows Vista, Office 12, and WinFX, so the primary theme of the release will be enabling developers to easily take advantage of the features of these new platform technologies.  The part of Orcas planning I own deals with how developers will be able to take advantage of new Windows Vista shell and UI technology from native C++.  I don't have a lot of specifics to share yet, but you can bet I'll post them here as soon as I do.

Most of the team is just finishing up a quality milestone, which we call MQ, that you may have read about on Soma's blog.  MQ was an effort by the majority of developer division to address the "bug debt" that tends to accrue in software over time.  The MQ process took about three or so months, which is a substantial investment in time for bug fixing and process improvements without any real feature work going on.  It's definitely worth the investment, though.  Not only will you see some of the results in the form of a VS 2005 service pack, but MQ also enables us to start Orcas with a clean code base.

Now that MQ is winding down, full-tilt work on Orcas will begin shortly.  However, if you have feedback for me on what Vista features you plan to take advantage of in your own VC++ applications, it's not too late to give me that feedback.  I assure you that your voice will be heard in the planning process.