Top 10 customer issues in Visual Studio 2005

MSDN Product Feedback Center is one of the best things we have done recently in an effort to stay better connected with our customers. Having this as a feedback mechanism to help understand what is foremost on our customers’ minds in Visual Studio 2005 has been super valuable. The “voting” feature in MSDN Product Feedback Center has helped us focus and prioritize working on issues that have the most customer mindshare. I recently looked at the top vote-getting customer issues, with a customer average rating higher than 4.0 to understand how well we are responding. Here is a list of the top customer issues and a brief commentary on how we have responded to these: 

Title: Deploy updated/new icon sets with Visual Studio

Average Customer Rating: 4.79      

Votes: 813                  

Issue Type: Bug          

Description: Shipping new icon sets was originally postponed for the next version but was fixed for Whidbey due to the overwhelming feedback on this bug.

Title: Edit and continue support for Visual C#     

Average Customer Rating: 4.55      

Votes: 399                  

Issue Type: Suggestion                    

Description: Edit and continue was the most requested feature for C#. This is another feature we were working on for a future release that we fit into Whidbey based on customer requests.

Title: Where did components area on Web Forms go??

Average Customer Rating: 4.71      

Votes: 178                  

Issue Type: Suggestion                    

Description: Twice we resolved this issue as "Won't Fix" but because "kzu" kept pushing, reopening the bug and insisting we reconsider, we did and fixed it for Beta 2. I want to thank kzu for driving this issue for the community.

Title: Tray Icon support is limited: System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon doesn't support Balloon Help without P/Invoke

Average Customer Rating: 4.54      

Votes: 174                  

Issue Type: Bug          

Description: To Kevin Daly's point in the discussion - we do want to make "Windows Forms the *best* way to do Windows UI". I'm really glad we fixed this bug.

Title: Enable Direct Downloads          

Average Customer Rating: 4.78      

Votes: 76                    

Issue Type: Suggestion                    

Description: This is a good example of the range of issues we receive and respond to in the PFC. This is not a bug in the product but is key to the beta process.

Title: ASP.NET Web Forms templates shouldn't use HTML that is considered obsolete      

Average Customer Rating: 4.7        

Votes: 67                    

Issue Type: Suggestion                    

Description: Old templates were replaced by 2 sites designed to adhere to the standards and avoid obsolete HTML.

Title: MSFB Ctrl+f5 of a console app doesnt cause the cmd window to stay around with "Press any Key to continue" message                                  

Average Customer Rating: 4.77      

Votes: 53                    

Issue Type: Bug          

Description: An Everett feature we originally removed was added back in.

Title: Intellisense completes word on space as well as tab       

Average Customer Rating: 4.46      

Votes: 50                    

Issue Type: Bug          

Description: Here we added customizability after overwhelming feedback was recieved

Title: Client Side Validation               

Average Customer Rating: 4.81      

Votes: 48                    

Issue Type: Bug          

Description: This bug was found internally as well but the customer found it 3 months earlier! 

Title: asp:Menu control only works in IE            

Average Customer Rating: 4.85      

Votes: 47                    

Issue Type: Bug          

Description: This bug has some amusing workarounds posted…

Namaste!