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In-Depth

Visual Studio: Developers Speak Up

Readers tell us what they love, and, well, don't love about Visual Studio, all so we can tell Microsoft how to make the next round of products better.

• By Doug Barney
• 01/01/2007

Visual Studio is, by nearly all accounts, a stable, mature, full-featured tool to build stable, mature, full-featured corporate and commercial applications. With a decade of constant development behind it, this IDE should be well-refined-after all, it is on version 8.0.

But developers and development managers are a fussy lot. Their tools are their lives and they take features, bugs and overall stability a bit more seriously than a casual Web surfer takes his browser.

With that in mind, several dozen Redmond and Redmond Developer News readers told us exactly what they love, and, well, don't love about Visual Studio, all so we can tell Microsoft how to make the next round of products better. And Microsoft is clearly listening, as no less than three product managers responded to your advice, suggestions and complaints. Some of your issues are being worked on now, and others are handled by Visual Studio 2005 SP1, which shipped at the tail end of last year.

One of the biggest beefs readers had is actually two gripes in one. Many customers complain that there are simply too many versions, and the ones with the features they want are too expensive. Prices range from $299 for Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition all the way up to $10,939 for Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite with a premium MSDN subscription.

Microsoft says its many versions are meant to address a variety of customer needs. "Before releasing Visual Studio 2005 Team System, we took a number of measures to help developers get the version of Visual Studio they wanted in the most cost-effective manner," a Microsoft official explains. All current MSDN Universal subscribers had the option to receive any of the role-based VSTS products -- Team Edition for Software Architects, Team Edition for Software Developers or Team Edition for Software Testers -- at no cost. They also had the option to upgrade to a "hard bundle" of the role-based VSTS for $2,299.

The Good Stuff Will Cost You
Even so, the pricing and licensing of Visual Studio (VS) is a problem for many corporate development shops -- especially smaller teams and independent developers. The desired features are often found in the premium versions of the IDE or in Visual Studio Team Edition.

Claps and Slaps What is your favorite feature? • Source Control (merge) and (branch) • Go to definition and find references • Click-once deployment • Debugger What feature needs the most work? • XML editor • Installation/Setup • SharePoint integration Customization "The tab bar (open files) should be customizable. It should be easier to define what a new class file looks like." • Object data binding "Still the flakiest crap I've tried to do. Maybe [that's] just the way it's supposed to work ... maybe just allow binding to a DataSet in the GUI for Web dev ... and leave it there, rather than trying to bring RAD to higher-level designers." What feature would you like to see? • Better support for patterns • SharePoint integration "Tasks should be available in the Portal." • Easy switching of Web sites (on different root directories on the localhost) • A click to collapse all file lists in the Solution Explorer "Many of my co-workers have had the same experience: We have many projects (50 or more) in a solution, and need to go back and forth between projects. The file lists can be very long [and] therefore, require many scrolls to find a project." If you were the Visual Studio product manager what would your top priority be? • Continuous Integration support • Better use of memory "Right now my devenv.exe process is using 177,916K of memory." Helping developers work the way they want to work "Make it easier for the developer to concentrate on logic and programming and forget the development environment. Let them open the files they want to open, run a Website in the directory they want it to run in, and name it (on the URI) what they want it to be named. Don't force the developers to work the way MS wants them to work, let them work the way they want to (VS2005 does a better job of this than VS2003 BTW)."

"[There's] too much emphasis on automatic code generation and RAD and not enough on design, refactoring and testing," says Dan Marks, a consultant for LogoSystems in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "They put some of this in the flagship [Team System] tool that only the largest software development companies can afford. But [they] price it out of range for most software development shops."

Owen Mortensen, senior Web developer for AuntMinnie.com in Tucson, Ariz., agrees: "The Team System would be awesome for us, but it's just not affordable."

Even developers in big organizations note the steep cost of VS. "I work for a large corporation, so it's not an issue for me, but the price tag is huge. If I needed to choose an IDE for personal development, I wouldn't choose VS," says Michael Callahan, a developer who is using Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, along with ASP.NET and C# to build an "an enterprise-level, high-performance search application capable of serving up several millions of searches per day."

Licensing of the roles-oriented Team Edition is also problematic. "One of the main issues that I have is the way that the product is licensed," says Torbe Christiansen, a Danish developer. "In smaller companies, where consultants often are in different roles, from time to time your only choice (if you want all the features) is to have the Team Suite edition. Microsoft should offer a license program where an organization can buy a number of the different roles that are not bound to the specific users."

Giving other developers access to the Team product is costly. "The licensing model of Team Foundation Server says you need one license for everyone retrieving information. This means I have to buy a CAL [Client Access License] for every customer I want to give access to the TFS for just entering bugs and get the status of his work items. That's too expensive!" asserts Thomas Schissler, a developer with Artiso in Germany.

"The Team Suite edition is just not within our reach" says Jarle Nygård, system developer for Synergi Solutions AS. "And even the tester/architect editions are very expensive. We're an ISV/Microsoft Gold Certified Partner so we get 35 licenses from Microsoft for the Developer edition, but we'd like to use the Tester edition too. For our small team the Suite edition would really be the best, but it's way too expensive for us at this time."

Microsoft says pricing for VS isn't out of line, and stresses that customers have options.

"Team Suite is very cost-effective when compared to other vendors in the lifecycle tools industry," a Microsoft official says. "It's true that there are a few features, such as unit testing and code coverage, in Visual Studio 2005 Team System that would be of interest to professional developers, regardless of the size of their team."

The Redmond official suggests users look at three versions. First off, there's Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition with MSDN Premium Subscription, which aims to "help small businesses to gain the same subscription benefits as large enterprises and is a pure superset of the functionality found in the old MSDN Universal Subscription. They should also consider the Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition with MSDN Professional Subscription and the Visual Studio 2005 Team System role-based product with MSDN Premium Subscription," the Microsoft official explains.

Smart timing can help reduce costs. "[It's] expensive unless you time it right to get the full upgrade to a standard license, and the next edition in MSDN. Now that price has gone up 30 percent for Open License," says Phil Collet, a developer with Citrus Motors in Ontario, Calif., who has used VS for the past three to four years. He's building an accounting, tracking and reporting application that integrates some 50 existing programs.

Trading Performance for Versatility
Visual Studio is an exhaustively complete IDE, but as it adds features, it gains bulk. Collet complains about slow VS2005 performance, which he blames on the IDE simply getting too big. "[Microsoft should] simplify it a bit and improve sluggish performance. [There are] lots of problems with Web cache folders disappearing, and design time ASP.NET page controls not being modifiable [the pre-cache of the page is gone]," he says.

VS user Michael Callahan feels Phil's pain. "I have mixed feelings about the latest VS release. It brings some great new features, but comes with some major headaches too. For one, it's a major memory hog. We had to upgrade all our workstations to 2GB RAM to stay productive," says Callahan.

Critical Links Microsoft encourages VS users to send comments to the MSDN Product Feedback Center. Just click here to go there now. Once registered, you'll get alerts when fixes are available, and can talk with Microsoft teams. Getting started: Microsoft has a range of entry-level Express Visual Studio tools. The Express products include Starter Kits (available here), which are project types that jumpstart development. In addition, Microsoft's Coding4Fun Developer Center on MSDN (see it here) also provides novice developers with "applications they can try out and modify to learn new programming techniques," says Prashant Sridharan, group product manager, Visual Studio. -- D.B.

But some features demand memory, and are worth the tradeoff, Microsoft argues. "As far as memory usage is concerned, customers should be aware that there's a tremendous amount of information we build and maintain in memory so that we can do functions like IntelliSense, which have to know every possible class and method for all possible contexts," says Jay Roxe, lead product manager for Visual Studio. "We need this information on all the libraries that are or could be relevant to what they're doing, not just the code that they're actively working on. While we're targeting significant memory savings in the future, it does mean that we'll always need a lot more memory than just the size of the files being edited might suggest."

Size can also introduce complexity. While many experienced users find Visual Studio to be a cakewalk (one said it was "almost too easy to use") others find the tool less than intuitive.

"In my opinion, too many features are still so complicated they are conceptually out-of-reach of the average developer (Designers, Attributes, Reflection, Generics). Hmmm ... maybe I just need to take a class. But anyway, I can get the job done without all that stuff," writes Pat Patterson, a software developer from the Seattle area, who writes applications for NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center's biologists, who collect ocean species census data.

Corporate developers are a pretty smart lot, but even the best run into problems every now and again. For Visual Studio, "Help" could also be more helpful. "I love the program. It's been easy to develop ASP.NET code in and it was fairly easy to get going," explains James Duncan, an information tech specialist with the Transportation Safety Institute in Oklahoma City, Okla. "The help could be greatly improved, though," he adds. "I've found it hard to find items I'm searching for -- I can find information on the Internet easier."

The documentation tool in Visual Studio 2005 is another feature that needs work, and Microsoft is doing just that. "I realize [Microsoft is] building a tool to take care of this," comments one developer, "but it's still in beta. My current method of documentation is to use a hacked version of NDoc that can target the .NET Framework 2.0. This really %*&%!! because after I have a CHM file built for my classes, I have to decompile it with HTML Workshop to merge other documentation into my original CHM.

"It would be great if the documentation tool [Microsoft] is building can address this issue directly inside VS2005, instead of having to go the third-party route," he adds.

Microsoft is on the case. "We are indeed working on a tool for helping [users] write documentation more efficiently," a Microsoft official notes.

They Hate To Be Left Hanging
Some users find the system to be unstable, hanging and crashing at inopportune times. "The user interface is completely unresponsive at times, especially when used inside a virtual machine," says one developer who asked to remain anonymous.

Andrew Teece, a technical architect for eNate in the United Kingdom, likes the product, but isn't a fan of its instability. "VS2005 is pretty good, [there's] no denying that," Teece says. "My biggest complaint is stability. We have a large, 20-plus project solution, and have huge stability problems with it. Two to three crashes a day are common for the whole team. Sometimes it even complains about our interface not being implemented correctly ... but it is. Restart VS2005 and the errors all go away! Hopefully a service pack is on the horizon, which will address the GUI problems, because the underlying framework is definitely the best programming platform available for performance, development time and stability."

Others have fewer, but still pesky stability problems. "I've been doing C# .NET daily since mid-2002. I like the current product a lot. It's still quirky, especially when working with image resources. Occasionally, it gets out of sync and deletes form objects or inexplicably resizes form windows each time I compile," says Seattle-based developer Pat Patterson.

Microsoft's Roxe believes the latest service pack might help: "Visual Studio SP1 addressed a significant number of customer bugs, many of which were reported by customers."

Not every user is experiencing problems with stability. "The occasional crash, nothing unexpected," says Synergi's Nygård. "Any version one release will have its set of problems. I'm actually pretty impressed with the stability of the server."

Others report entirely smooth sailing. "[Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition] is more stable than VS2003. I have no problems," reports Artiso's Schissler.

Raves and Craves
We've spent a fair amount of time telling Microsoft how to improve Visual Studio. But the company deserves a few pats on the back as well.

Schissler has been using Visual Studio Team Edition to build Windows and Web apps for the last year, and considers it a "great development tool." Topping Schissler's list of favorites is "IntelliSense and all related features like Code Snippets and Refactoring and Databinding." In fact, many customers reported IntelliSense to be their favorite feature.

"I've tried a few others, but the IntelliSense and building from the IDE keeps me stuck to VS. As far as C# IDEs, it's the best I've used," offers VS user Michael Callahan.

"My favorite feature is IntelliSense. It really helps memory-challenged coders like me," says David Lambert, programmer/analyst for Random Lengths Publications in Eugene, Ore.

"[I] love the new virtual Web server instead of IIS [Internet Information Services] integration. [And] one-touch deployment is the bomb," raves Collett.

But the Web server is not universally popular. "I think VS2005 rocks the house," says Don Mason, a California-based Web developer. "I do have an issue with using the built-in Web server, Cassini, however (nice as it is). I develop Web apps with designers who use tools other than VS and now find I have a harder time architecting the site on a network share, [which is] not possible when using the built-in Web server as it only runs on a local machine and not across network boundaries," he explains. "I must now use one of three means: FrontPage extension (pollution), source control (not a bad idea anyway) or set up using FTP Access (slow). This causes some unexpected behavior when compiling/debugging a layered application as the different projects now have security applied to them even though they live in the same folder and same solution!"

One answer may come in a new line of Microsoft products aimed at professional designers, which stand to ease some of the collaboration challenges with developers. "Expression Web, part of the Expression Studio, is a professional design tool that delivers a set of features that enable designers to create compelling designs effortlessly," says Brian Goldfarb, Microsoft group product manager, Web Platform and Tools. "It also boosts developer productivity by harnessing the power of ASP.NET 2.0 and offering seamless integration with Visual Studio."

All Together Now
Visual Studio user Jivtesh Singh is particularly fond of Team Test. "[A few friends and I] had a week off and decided to play around with Team Test. We're testing it out on an AJAX-enabled ASP.NET Web site. We've used WATIR before for testing our Web apps -- in fact, we're comparing how the existing scripts in Ruby compare with VSTS Web tests," explains Singh, chief evangelist for Sublime Edge Pragmatic Solutions Pvt. Ltd. in India. "For all the money they charge, we think it's still worth it. Definitely rocks! I am pretty shocked people are not talking about it ... Am I missing something? Any particular reason why people aren't talking about it?"

Getting Communal Microsoft will be the first to tell you that it's all about responding to customer feedback. When the company released in December a pair of service packs for Visual Studio 2005 (Visual Studio 2005 SP1 and Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista beta), Microsoft officials were quick to credit user feedback for the fixes. "For some of the teams within Visual Studio, 50 percent of the bugs they fixed were discovered and reported through the MSDN product feedback center," says Jay Roxe, lead product manager for Visual Studio. Industry analyst Neil Macehiter says Microsoft values partner and customer feedback -- to a point. "Microsoft actually has a developer community that is the envy of the industry, and one which other vendors have attempted to emulate: DeveloperWorks, SAP Developer Network and others," Macehiter says. "But all vendors take customer feedback. The question is, who is prioritizing those requests? Who decides what's in and out? In this case, Microsoft does." Microsoft is hardly alone. Macehiter points out that large vendors dominate the Java Community Process and even many of the most successful open source projects. Microsoft is now among them. In June, Microsoft launched CodePlex, a collaborative software development portal. The company bills the site, which will host open source and shared-source projects, as "a forum to bring together developers from around the world." Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio called CodePlex "both an olive branch to the open source world, and an acknowledgement of its growing influence." "[Microsoft] correctly understands that the extended development community is critical to their ongoing success," says Forrester analyst Jeffery Hammond, "but there's one critical line they haven't crossed. When developers find a defect that annoys them or makes them less productive, they cannot dig in, fix it and contribute it back to the community. The right comparison ... is probably Eclipse. Look at the difference in rate of change in IDE features and bug fixes between the two. Both organizations care about their communities, but Microsoft is doing less to harness the community brainpower, which means they have to shoulder more of the burden and cost of innovation. Inevitably things fall off the plate, things that the community could fix if they were part of the team." -- John K. Waters

Singh and his team immediately put Team Test to work. "We haven't been disappointed so far, and VSTS continues to save us tons of time we would spend testing manually."

Visual Studio Team System is a major leap forward in helping groups work together on complex projects, and to accommodate different roles within the team. But a product of this complexity and ambition is not perfect. "I've been using VSTS for six months. I had big hopes to improve the development process in our company with it, to integrate customers better in the development process. I thought I could give them access to some information I could manage with Team Foundation Server like Documents, Work Items and others," says Artiso's Schissler.

"The first problem is that no accurate platform exists to provide customers the possibility to enter found bugs and to track the status of their bugs directly via a Web interface without giving the customer a complete insight into the project details. This could be solved with developing something on your own or with third-party products," Schissler continues. "TFS seems to not be finished. If you cannot delete Team Projects through the Team Explorer and have to use the command-line tools instead, if you can't move one project from one server to another, and if you can't even rename your projects -- this seems to me to be [bad] software, which gets finished after delivery."

There is a third-party solution, Microsoft says. "One of our Visual Studio Industry Partners, devBiz Business Solutions, offers a solution that meets this exact need," says Prashant Sridharan, group product manager for Visual Studio. "TeamPlain Web Access provides a Web interface for Team Foundation Server so teams can manage work items, shared documents, reports and source control repositories." For more on TeamPlain Web Access, see http://www.devbiz.com.

Outrage over Upgrades
Upgrade paths could also use some smoothing, users say. "We're using VS for maintenance of an existing subscription system written in Visual Basic 6," explains Random Lengths' programmer/analyst David Lambert. "We're developing a new subscription service for online access to similar information in VS2005. We have to hold on to the older versions because we're a small shop and we're unable to part with the resources to upgrade the old system to the new technology.

"If Microsoft wants to sunset its older versions of VS it needs to provide small shops like us a better method for upgrading," says Lambert. "I believe it was last year that Microsoft axed support for VB6 to a huge uproar from coders in a similar position to my own. I spent years building a subscription system in VB6 only to find that I couldn't upgrade the product without a complete rewrite."

Visual Studio ... in Blogs Visual Studio has inspired a fleet of blogs, both internal and external to Microsoft. Here are a few choice outtakes and excerpts from some of the most popular and valuable VS-obsessed blog sites on the 'Net. Rob Caron http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron A Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio 2005 Team System, Part I ... Each graduated edition of [VS] .NET includes all of the functionality found in the edition beneath it. For example, [VS] .NET 2003 Enterprise Developer includes all of the functionality found in [VS] .NET Professional, which includes all of the functionality found in Visual Basic .NET 2003 Standard Edition, [VS] .NET C# 2003 [SE], [VS] .NET J# 2003 [SE] and Visual C++ 2003 [SE] ... Soma Somasegar http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar Tools to Help Developers Build Solutions for Office 2007 ... We delivered Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) to enable developers to build Microsoft Office-based solutions. VSTO 2003 introduced the notion of managed code solutions based on Microsoft Office, and VSTO 2005 provided developers with a host of features they needed to build the types of solutions their users required. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System (VSTO 2005 SE) expands the developer's palette by providing the means to build scalable 2007 Office system-based add-in solutions within the professional development environment of Visual Studio 2005. Developers can use VSTO 2005 SE to build solutions that take advantage of key 2007 Office system features, such as the ribbon, custom task panes and Outlook form regions. They can also use VSTO 2005 SE to build Microsoft Office business applications. In fact, the Office team used VSTO to build parts of Microsoft Duet ... Scott Guthrie http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu HTML Source Editing Performance Improvements in VS 2005 SP1 ... One of the overall goals with VS 2005 SP1 was to improve IDE performance and responsiveness for a number of common scenarios (a few examples: build times, managing large projects, refactoring and intellisense). For Web-scenarios, we specifically worked on the performance of the HTML source editor -- especially with cases involving large HTML documents or slower machines.

Microsoft has a different perspective. "For some applications, a complete rewrite isn't the best way to leverage the benefits of Visual Basic 2005 and the .NET Framework," says Microsoft's Roxe. "First, there's no rush to upgrade. Visual Basic 6.0 applications will remain relevant for years to come: Vista supports the Visual Basic 6.0 runtime, so those applications can continue running on a supported platform for another decade. The Visual Basic 6.0 IDE also runs on Vista."

Visual Basic 6.0 developers can upgrade their applications at their own pace, asserts Roxe. "The Forms Interop Toolkit allows developers to embed Visual Basic 2005 Windows Forms into existing Visual Basic 6.0 .EXEs," he says. "This is in addition to the ability to call Visual Basic 6.0 COM objects from .NET code, and to access the entire .NET Framework from Visual Basic 6.0. In short, start adding new functionality to Visual Basic 6.0 applications with Visual Basic 2005 now, and upgrade existing Visual Basic 6.0 code as needed, form by form."

Despite a few grumbles, Lambert is a big fan of VS. "We've been using VB6 since 1999. We started working with .NET in 2002, and we're currently working with [VS] 2003 and 2005. I think the IDE is quite good -- and getting better. I use VS because I think Microsoft has the best technology in the industry. I also think they're leaving guys like me in the dust with aging apps and no resources to upgrade them."

SQL Server or Bust
One of the biggest breakthroughs with Visual Studio 2005 is tight integration with SQL Server 2005. "The databases aren't going away anytime soon," says Citrus Motors' developer Collet. "As they love to say, it helps people use the RDMS and later possibly move to SQL Server. I have spun a couple of things in SQL Server 2005, because that's all SQL Server Integration Services [SSIS] likes to play with. MySQL isn't as bloated as SQL Server 2005, so it might not allow the schema discovery SSIS needs anyway," he adds.

But other databases are just as important, and not well supported. "[There's] almost no support of MySQL and ODBC with RAD tools," says Collet. "MySQL has an alpha release to help use MySQL with VS. I know [Microsoft] doesn't make money off MySQL or DB2, but it makes a few dollars from VS."

Oracle integration is another concern. "I use the Standard Edition now (had the Professional version of .NET 2003) but the cost kept escalating and we integrate with Oracle, not SQL Server," says Northwest Fisheries' developer Patterson.

Synergi Solutions' Nygård is using Visual Studio Developer edition to build the next version of Synergi Enterprise Risk Management software. He's evaluating the Tester Edition and says Oracle support is critical. "We do a lot of database work, which is currently handled outside of VS. We need support for Oracle databases before we can use the DB Pro edition," he says.

Needless to say, Nygård, like Patterson, is pushing Redmond to embrace Oracle by supporting the DBMS in the Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals. "I've been in contact with them and they're aware of the need for this support. Hopefully that'll be in version 2," says Nygård.

Help may be on the way from Microsoft and the third parties themselves. "If you desire support for other databases, we encourage you to contact those vendors and either inquire about the availability of their tools or encourage them to join Visual Studio Industry Partners," says Microsoft's Sridharan. "Both Oracle and MySQL are members of the VSIP programs and have stated their intention to provide tighter integration between their databases and Visual Studio."

Lack of non-Microsoft support is not the only database gotcha. "I'm finding that the Data Sources creation subsystem in Visual Studio is so broken and useless it's almost not worth using. If you decide to use standard SQL statements for your interface, half of the time it never creates the Insert, Update and Delete functions," says Walt Crosby, chief architect for Everyday Wireless in Concord, Mass.

Multiplatform Dreams
Visual Studio has far better multi-platform support than previous Microsoft tools. Software can be written to run on PCs, handhelds and as Web services. But more platforms are always better. "While I really love Visual Studio, we aren't using the role-based tools," says Craig Berntson, a Microsoft MVP and senior software engineer for a Fortune 100 company in Salt Lake City, Utah. "We need to support multiple platforms and are doing .NET and Java and Windows and Linux. That just isn't supported in VS. We've spent lots of money on other software that does the same thing: source control, testing, etc. and we're not going to abandon it."

He adds, "The costs of some of the versions are going to hurt the smaller shops. They still have a need for source control, testing, etc., but the cost of these tools is too prohibitive for them. Bottom line, if you're a large Microsoft shop, then the tools are great. If you're a mixed tool and platform environment, then you'll need to look elsewhere for your tools. If you're a small shop, think carefully about the cost-benefit ratio of VS."

Supporting other target platforms is one thing, actually running on them is another. In fact, VS user Michael Callahan is hoping for "a version that runs on Linux." That may not be in the cards!

The Open Source Question
Perhaps the ultimate platform for support is open source, and here, customer opinions are mixed. "Open source by itself doesn't really bring a lot to the table, it's the level of openness from Microsoft and the ability to extend and utilize VS/VSTS/TFS for third parties that's important. If it's open source or not isn't a focus from our perspective," says Nygård.

Phil Collet thinks Microsoft should do more to have Visual Studio support open source. "MySQL is out there ... now deal with it," he says. "The availability of source code and real demo products ... not how to open-a-text-file samples. .NetNuke and CodeProject and c-sharpcorner really helped me move to .NET. There's a huge entry-level barrier, which I'm sure .NET architects enjoy," he says.

Several others suggest that Microsoft support PHP, and apparently the company is listening. In October, Microsoft announced a roadmap outlining its technical collaboration with Zend to improve the performance of PHP on the Windows platform.

"This partnership was in direct response to customer demand and we continue to evaluate further ways to expand interoperability even more. This is one of our biggest steps in recent years and it exemplifies our commitment to participate and reach out to the open-source community," says Microsoft's Goldfarb.

No question, Microsoft's IDE has gone through a lot of changes since it first debuted as Visual Studio 97. The first programming solution from Redmond to support multiple programming languages, VS '97 included C++, Visual Basic, Visual J++ for Java programming and introduced the Visual InterDev Web development solution.

Today, Visual Studio is a staggeringly complete suite that extends its talents to workflow, testing and database integration. The extensive features have helped make Visual Studio the most widely deployed and indispensable commercial IDE on the market. Microsoft is adding even more functionality in the next release, code-named "Orcas." (See the news article, "Developers Struggle to Keep Abreast of the 'Orcas' Wave")

Of course, too much of a good thing has given time-pressed developers plenty to complain about. But Microsoft, from all accounts, is heeding your advice and working with customers, and the development community, to make Visual Studio, and its myriad of toolsets, even better.

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