Please use the new Visual Studio Feedback Center: it rocks

  • Article

Until recently, there were various methods of sending us, the Visual Studio team, feedback. However, almost all of that feedback never made it to us, the developers. It went somewhere I am sure, but not to us. I am pleased to say that has now changed.

There is now the MSDN Product Feedback Center, which internally is known as LadyBug. It is almost impossible to find this by browsing our web site (I know, I just tried for ten minutes), so please add the link to your Favorites.

The reasons this is so much better than anything we've had previously are:

  • We get to see the feedback, within minutes of a report being added, in our real live bug database
  • We can contact you to get more information
  • Others can see already reported issues, and vote on them to help increase the visibility of the issue and increase the chances of a fix

An example is here. The report was that Filter By was missing from the breakpoint window. I couldn't repro this on my machine, so I asked if this was C# Express. It was not, so I experimented a bit more and discovered that the C# Profile disabled this menu item (I run with the C++ Profile with VC2 keystrokes). I posted a work-around and we have a real bug in our real bug database that will ensure we fix this before release.

You can add Suggestions via Ladybug as well as bug reports. Although it is unlikely that many suggestions will make it into the VS 2005 product (as we are at beta 1 now and beta means feature complete), the fact you can make them and we can see them will really help when planning the next version. In addition other people can add their Vote to your suggestions too.

Ladybug also shows Top 10 lists, so you can see what is the most popular bug or suggestion. This is great for us and for you.

I urge you to browse the site and try it out if you are using any of the VS 2005 pre-release versions.