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Visual Studio Gets Service Pack Tweak

I've suddenly become very interested in Visual Studio, not because I have the ambition (or skill) to build the next killer app, but because we just launched a new magazine for corporate developers, Redmond Developer News.

For those who keep count, that's Redmond's third magazine launch in a smidge more than two years. First was Redmond magazine itself, then less than a year later Redmond Channel Partner, and last month we put out the first issue of Redmond Developer News.

This trio does two things: It takes up a lot of my time, so forgive grammatical errors and the many logical inconsistencies in this here newsletter (better to blame it on lack of time than lack of skill).

On the positive side, this lets us see more of the market and make connections between different segments. And that's how I became fascinated with Visual Studio. It drives much of how our computers look, act and function in years to come.

After 31 years as a developer-oriented company, the service pack (SP1) for Visual Studio 2005 ain't (there go those grammatical errors again!) quite the breakthrough that was Altair Basic, but for folks that live inside Visual Studio, it's a fairly big deal.

I've been communicating with a lot of Visual Studio folks lately, so when Microsoft says the service pack was driven by customer feedback, I buy it hook, line and sinker.

A lot of user problems have to do with performance, and VS SP1, partly through dual core support, tackles this problem. There's also a whole, big wad of bug fixes. Woohoo!

Next up is a service pack specifically aimed at Vista development.

Posted by Doug Barney on December 20, 2006


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