The Moth

If you are playing with VS2005 you must be familiar with the MSDN product feedback center. Anybody can basically make suggestions for enhancements and also report bugs (it goes without saying that the two are not the same thing)

When I first met it, I thought this was a great idea and immediately starting using it for bug reports and suggestions. Now I am not so sure. The cynic in me has started to believe that the feedback center is there to gather our input for the next version of .NET (i.e. not Whidbey but Orcas). I do hope that is not the case and I will keep using it. I reserve final judgment for when the product ships.

The reason I have started having doubts is the number of suggestions that get 'postponed', 'resolved as won't fix' etc. Just randomly browse through the suggestions made and note how many are actually taken on board. Browsing through bug reports reveals that actually MSFT have already caught most of the bugs that we report. The few additional ones that have slipped their net seem to get attention (unlike the suggestions we file).

If you know of any suggestions that have made it into the product do let me know. Naturally suggestions that they had already decided to make don't count (usually these are stated as "Thank you for your suggestion this is how it works in our current builds").

Here is the list of suggestions I was tracking that are postponed [1,2,3,4,5,6] and here are the outstanding ones [1,2,3,4]. Not to mention the 10 postponed suggestions on the Class Designer (detailed in a previous entry)

As I said, my bug reports have all been addressed except for one which is resolved as won't fix; still fighting it.

A couple of other blog entries on the same theme are [1,2]

Rant over :-|