What sort of support cases are we seeing with Whidbey?

Customers are now starting to use the release version in earnest. Inevitably, support cases are coming in. I thought that it might be interesting to let you know what areas seem to be generating the calls.

As we would expect, there are some setup issues for the IDE. That is not because the install is problematic but because a lot of people are currently installing the product. With a product that is not shiny and new, most users have it installed and the problems that they hit will be related to usage. With a new product, everyone is at the installation phase and so we get a rash of setup issues. There are fewer than I would have expected which is a good sign. A lot of them are from people who had the Beta and didn’t clean up properly before installing the release.

We are seeing some applications broken by known breaking changes. This often catches people out when we go from one major version to another. Minor revisions (1.0 to 1.1) have relatively few breaking changes. Major revisions (1.1 to 2.0) have more. Remoting between 1.1 and 2.0 doesn’t work well because of this.

Intellisense for C++ seems to have some issues. That will probably result in a hotfix in the fairly near future but I am not involved in that so please don’t mail me about it.

Generics seem to be working well but there is at least one complex and rather obscure case where we generate invalid code after passing nothing to a constructor. It isn’t an intermittent issue so it should show up quickly when you test if you manage to hit this particular set of circumstances.

We have seen some issues with the IDE if SQL Server 2005 is installed on a machine after VS. None of them affect anything major but you might prefer to install SQL first.

All this might sound like a catalogue of disasters but this is based on support calls from 1/3 of the world so it is actually a very short list. The product quality seems good, especially for a major revision. I am sure that there will be a few glitches that we will hear about in the next few weeks but that is always true of a product release, be it from Microsoft or anyone else.

Signing off

Mark