Interesting, but...

MS are going to have a hard sell.

I find it's a tough call between VS 2003, 2005 and 2008.. 2003 is a known quantity, works and is the choice for stable projects. 2005 has 64bit compiles, but is a buggy as hell. 2008 seems to have solved most of the 2005 bugs but has its own, like it'll suddenly vanish whilst you're typing (which is *fun* if you've forgotten to save for half an hour).

MS seem to always focus on TLA of the week over stability.. and it takes until SP1 + a bunch of other workarounds before the product is usable. DLR, ALM.. whatever. They'll be forgotten 10 seconds into a project because they're not relevant to 99% of people.

When I'm sat there I want an editor that doesn't crash, a compiler that produces reasonable code. Edit&continue is nice, when it works (and no, changing a *comment* should *not* cause it to fail). Same with the completion/highlighting stuff. Great, when it works.

Forget the rest. Get that stable and we'll adopt it. Produce the normal collection of unstable rubbish and you'll be lucky until it's seen until 2015.

Overview of release dates

Finally beta 2! Great news. Pity that we need to wait until a few days before the release and hear from employees indirectly when it will arrive. It'll probably take just as long before we find out the actual RTM dates (assuming 22nd May is not an RTM date but the actual release date). Will there be any significant other releases (beta 3, release candidates)? I tried to estimate some of the dates based on previous experiences and put them together here: http://www.undermyhat.org/blog/2009/10/visual-studio-2010-roadmap-final-release-dates-known/ (sorry cannot create a link here, so you'll have to copy/paste it).

Old fogey chimes in

Why is there never any discussion of the code generated with these tools? Any talk of a new Visual Studio is all about what new eye candy is present, or which new paradigm Microsoft is enthused about this year.

Can the C/C++ compiler generate code that takes advantage x86 SIMD instructions sets more recent than SSE2? Will/can it auto-generate code that uses multiple CPU cores? Can I once again compile for a specific CPU type, or is Microsoft still spouting that absurd claim that that the instruction sequence generated is optimal for all x86 processors?

Unusuable

Recently I had to work on a C# project, and was quite surprised at how horrible visual studio is to work with, compared to Java IDE's such as eclipse. After only a day or two of working with Visual studio I felt a powerful desire to pull my fingernails out.

Eclipse has a million subtle ways of making working with code a pleasure. Visual studio was barren in comparision, it's virtually wordpad with a compiler. No wonder MS products are so flakey, VS is ten years behind the curve.

Not to mention that it locks you into windows, and windows mobile is dead, windows "phone" is still born, and windows itself is a sinking ship. Do you really want to be locked in?