I got mentioned on Mini Microsoft, along with couple of others that had similar problems. The comments there are pretty interesting.

The official launch is tomorrow, so that means that anyone who is using 2005 RTM is a hard core guy, and they are the fellows that are passionate about it. They are the ones that are hurt by those bugs. Because you're not supposed to find so many bugs in a product so fast. Some of those bugs will cause me to lose my work. That is unacceptable. What is going to happen when hundreds of thousands of developers move to VS 2005?

They will run into those bugs, and they will be furious when they will see that it is a known bug.

I know that Microsoft couldn't probably delay the launch, since there are quite a few projects that depends on it. I would've solved it by giving the developers a beta 3 with Go Live license, and doing nothing but fixing the bugs in the product. Hell, I would have been perfectly okay with shipping the framework & compilers, and having another beta of the IDE, since most of the problems are centered there.

That being said, Microsoft decided that this isn't the road they are going to follow. The past is the past, what I want now is to make sure that I wouldn't spend the next two years struggling with bugs and hearing how great Orcas is. I had opened a suggestion for a service pack for Visual Studio 2005 in the next three to six months. Go and vote for it.

I think that having a bug fixing only service pack in this time frame is reasonable, and would go a long way to smooth a lot of ruffled feathers. Microsoft should announce it soon. So far, I see far too many posts about problems with RTM, and not enough gushing about how great it is.

That said, this post really pisses me off:

This one is from the DDCPX blog, the (take a deep breath) Developer Division Customer Product-Lifecycle Experience Team. It basically says: Get used to those bugs, they'll be with you for a long time.

I don't think that a product as big as VS.Net can ship completely bug free, but I do think that there should be a support story for it. And posting workarounds is not a good solution. Take for instance the suggested workaround for improving Refactoring speed for solutions that contains web projects: Open all the web pages in the project before doing refactoring, find all references, etc. This goes contrary to the way I work (open as few windows as possible) that it isn't even funny.

Fixing those bugs, and much sooner than Orcas, should be a high priority task for Microsoft, because otherwise they are putting a very tempting target for any other company that can do better than that. We have asked repeatedly to concentrate on stability and performance. Microsoft has a really well written answer for that in the suggestion about another beta for VS 2005, but it's just not enough. Not in the face of the bugs we are facing.