Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2003

Visual Studio 2003 SP1

Visual Studio 2005 has been available since November 2005, and I think it's a really good upgrade from VS2003. But, we at Microsoft understand that some people like to stick with what they already have. Along those lines, we've just shipped Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2003.

Microsoft has a 5+5 support policy for business and developer software. Under that policy, we support products for a minimum of 10 years. We give 5 years of mainstream support, and following that, 5 years of extended support (for an extra fee) for business and developer software. That would include Visual Studio, SQL Server, Windows client and server, and many other products. In addition, we guarantee at least 2 years warning before sunsetting a product.
I think that policy leads the industry. IBM, for example, offers "at least 3 years" of support and "at least 1 year" of warning before sunsetting a product. With Microsoft, the terms are clearer and more definite, and the times are longer. Anyway....

On August 15, 2006, SP1 for VS2003 became available to the public. You can download it, or get it on CD.

This Service Pack includes a number of stability fixes, security enhancements, and other solutions to customer issues that were identified between the time of the initial VS2003 product release and that of VS2005. We anticipate that customers will enjoy additional stability in their development environment, by adopting this SP.

Some links:

Cheers,

-Dino