Are we ready to ship VS?

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There was an interesting Ladybug issue suggesting that we release a Beta 3 & slip VS 2005.

This is a politically sensitive issue.  It has generated some press, so I want to be careful about what I say here.

I'm very glad that Clint took the time to provide us this feedback, and want to say thanks to everyone who commented and/or voted on the issue.  This is excellent feedback.

I do want to comment on a few things.

"many issues get resolved as Postponed."  That's concerning to me.  It's normal for us to ship a product with many known, unfixed issues.  This is mostly because our testers do such great work (finding lots of issues that we can ship with, and still have a great product), not because we're shipping too soon (with issues that will cause lots of customer pain).  I have a very high standard for the quality of our software, and I hold my team to that standard.  I've seen a lot of non-Microsoft software that was surprisingly bad, and which just tells me that we're doing a good job with reliability here.

That said, I know that we have gotten this wrong, too.  We have shipped some broken software in the past, so it's possible (likely!) that we would make the mistake to ship something broken again in the future.  We need to admit that we can make mistakes, and do the work to make sure we're making the right choices here.

One of the interesting things that I've learned in my Shiproom role is that most of the perception of poor quality is not due to bugs, per se.  It's not about whether we introduced a bad bug late in the product & decided not to fix it, or didn't even notice it.  It's about design decisions made early on that cause problems we don't fix.  You can see that in the discussion of this Ladybug issue.  There's a lot of concern about the project-less model for the Web Developer.  This isn't a bug, it's a design decision that we made a long time ago.

Well, I think I'm rambling.  Thanks for all your passion about the quality of VS, and for putting in the effort to give us your feedback.  We love it all.