Download Visual Studio 2005 hotfixes without contacting Microsoft Developer Support

I just heard about a pilot project that was introduced this past week and I wanted to let folks know about.  The Visual Studio team is making the top 10 most requested hotfixes for Visual Studio 2005 available for download on the Microsoft Connect site.  The eventual goal is to make a much larger set of hotfixes available on the Connect site, but having the top 10 hotfixes posted is a great step in that direction and I'm excited to see that we're trying to make hotfixes easier to find.

Previously, customers who wanted to get a hotfix had to find the knowledge base article describing the fix and then contact Microsoft Developer Support.  Josh Ledgard previously wrote about an experiment his team performed to figure out how frustrating it could be to obtain Visual Studio hotfixes from Microsoft.

You can read more background about this hotfix policy change on Brian Harry's blog.