Microsoft Talks Up Visual Studio Future

Microsoft may have just shipped Visual Studio 2005, but the company is already starting to discuss its future plans for the development suite. Service Pack 1 is in the works for next summer, says Visual C# product manager Scott Wiltamuth, and Orcas -- the next VS release -- is being hashed out.

The first service pack for the older Visual Studio 2003 will also ship in the first half of next year, with Wiltamuth estimating an April release. Soma Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division, echoed those timeframes, saying the company would provide hotfixes in the interim.

"My current thinking is that we will target the first service pack for Visual Studio 2005 around summer next year," Somasegar wrote on his Web log. "As we get more mileage on the product usage in your production environment and get your feedback, we will firm up our plans here."

But Visual Studio 2005, known by its code-name "Whidbey," still has some work ahead despite officially launching this week at a special event in San Francisco. International versions of the product are currently being completed, and the Team Foundation Server component won't be ready until the first quarter of 2006.

Acknowledging that Microsoft took too long getting Whidbey out the door, Somasegar says his division will now embark on a 3-4 month-long milestone known as "MQ" that will attempt to fix those development problems.

"MQ is a milestone that is post-Whidbey and pre-Orcas that will focus on quality," explained C# team member Eric Malno. "We have learned a lot from the previous 3 versions of Visual Studio that were built around the .NET Framework, the biggest lesson that we learned on this most recent version was that we were not agile enough and we took too long to ship."

Malno added, however, that "MQ is not about servicing Whidbey. The MQ milestone is about changing processes and making improvements on these processes. It is NOT about code churn, adding features, or fixing known bugs in VS2005."

After MQ, Orcas will begin to swim. "Orcas is all about enabling platform adoption for Windows Vista, for Office 12 and for WinFX," says Somasegar. "You can use Whidbey today to build Vista applications, for example. But Orcas will make it a whole lot easier for people to build Vista applications through easy to use designers and the like."

In a growing trend at the once-secretive company, Microsoft will boost transparency during the development of Orcas. The company will share specific feature plans and request feedback from customers before details are set into stone.

Somasegar also says his division will begin work on a number of incubation experiments -- a concept that has become a veritable requirement within MSN and Microsoft search rival Google.

"In light of the 'Live' announcements last week, we are starting to think about what it means for us in the Developer world," he explained. "There are two things that we need to think about -- the kind of tools support that we need to provide for our 'Live' services platform and what does 'Visual Studio Live' look like."