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Major Late Stage Change on Tap for Visual Studio

According to a senior Microsoft executive, Microsoft is introducing what he calls a "big change" to Visual Studio 2005 in the August Community Technology Preview that is coming out shortly.

Such a major change is unusual for a product this late in the development cycle. Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft's flagship development environment, is planned for launch on Nov. 7 and should be released to manufacturing well before that date.

"Recently, we took a big DCR (Design Change Request) into Visual Studio 2005 that was in response to your feedback," wrote S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president in Microsoft's developer division, in a recent blog entry. "This was a hard call, because it was a big change that touched many components including the [Common Language Runtime]."

Somasegar's entry implied the change shouldn't affect the release date. "We decided to take this change at this late stage in the game because a) this was the right product design and I always believe in optimizing for the long-term and b) I had confidence in the team(s) to be able to get this work done in time for Visual Studio 2005," he wrote.

The change involves a new implementation of a data type called System.Nullable in the .NET Runtime for Visual Studio 2005.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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