Windows Vista will be released later this year to partners and volume license customers and in the beginning of 2007 to the masses. A successful release of a software product such as Windows Vista requires that a lot of consultants use it and can recommend it to the companies.
The last few days it has come out in the open that Windows Vista will not support Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 until the first service pack is released, during the first half of 2007, and even then it will be compatibility issues. Visual Studio.NET 2002 and 2003 will definitley not be supported on the Windows Vista platform!
I think this is outrageous, and I’m not alone!
Visual Studio.NET 2003 is one of the most used development platforms today, and the lack of support for it in Windows Vista will result in that a lot of developers will not use Windows Vista as their primary development platform.
Of course you can use Virtual PC or Virtual Server on Windows Vista and have all of you development done in them. But this requires that you have a good hardware platform and makes the development more lengthy.
I really want to use Windows Vista on my development machine and therefore I ask Microsoft to tell us exactly what is not supported when using Visual Studio 2005, pre and post SP1 and what exactly is not supported when using Visual Studio.NET 2003.
Sure, I can try it for myself, but that will not calm my clients nor myself!
Last week I met with a company that the next year will change/upgrade their whole PC platform, more than 1.000 PCs, and they will probably not go with Windows Vista directly and they will definitly not go with it if not their suppliers and consultants don’t.