I have been posting infrequently, but it seems that a new pronouncement by Somasegar always stirs me up. The last time, it was about the .NET 3.0 Framework naming debacle. This time, it is about how the new Microsoft flagship operating system breaks with .NET 1.0/1.1 production support. Specifically, Microsoft will not support Visual Studio 2002 and 2003 on Vista.
This is another ludicrous slap in the face.
It is impossible to spin this in a good manner. Buzzwords like “compatibility“, “customer feedback“, and “great development platform” gloss over the weak “works well”, the “working to understand”, and the “provide workarounds.”
Don't get me wrong -- I am using VS05 in my development work and love the features. Happily, I have no older .NET code to support. My legacy code is in VB6. My guess is that this has to do regression testing to make sure everything worked -- they had no time. Another possibility is the 64 bit stuff. Since .NET 3.0 is really .NET 2.0+stuff (and should have been called .NET 2.1), they could get out of it pretty easily on the testing side.
Remember that it took a wave of mea culpa blog posts to explain the stupid confusion they created with .NET 3.0 announcement, culminating in a good Roy Osherove post that corrected the previous feeble attempts. I am waiting for the “but wait we can really explain what Somasegar meant” posts to arrive.
Update: Here is a succinct summary by Mike Gunderloy. My points exactly.