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What pain do you feel in the Application Designer (Distributed System Designer)?

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It has been a several months since we shipped Visual Studio 2005 Beta1 with the Distributed System Designers. A lot of customers have started looking into the Distributed System Designers since then.

 

We have been getting some feedback on features that customers would like to see in the designers through the logging of bugs/suggestions at the MSDN Feedback Center. Thanks to all that have participated so far!

 

Logging these issues helps us to understand and track them. More importantly, it gives customers a voice to 'vote' for their favorite feature(s). While we can't promise all these suggestions will make it into the product this release, adding votes to your favorite feature will certainly increase the likelihood the important ones will.   Suggestions that don’t make it into this release will be tracked and considered for future releases.

 

Therefore, I want to further encourage users to let us know what they would like to see in our product, the Distributed System Designers.

 

Cheers,

 

Ali

 

Ported from Ramesh’s blog for the Class Designer - https://blogs.msdn.com/r.ramesh/archive/2004/08/26/221245.aspx

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 06, 2005
    I followed the link on your page to the MSDN Feedback Center and tried to report a bug.

    The center put me into an infinite loop.

    I click on "Report a Bug"

    The Feedback Center takes me to "Step 1: Search for a Duplicate Bug".

    I select "C#" and "Solution Explorer" as my product area and key words and search for duplicates (the only option I have on this page).

    The feedback center takes me back to the main ProductFeedback Page.

    I click again on "Report a bug".

    It takes me back to "Step 1: Search for a Duplicate Bug".


    And the cycle continues forever.

    -Don
  • Anonymous
    January 06, 2005
    Pasha,

    what i would like to see is a lot more work going into fixing current products.

    there has been virtually no fixup for vs.2003 - and this one has tons of problems all over the place.

    i simply don't think that upgrading to a whole new dev platform (with new problems all over the place for sure) is a viable way to go.

    you guys are abandoning 'older' ides - just to go for newer,cooler ones.

    thats a path thats hard to follow.

    at least for this guy.

    WM_MY0.02$
    thomas woelfer
  • Anonymous
    January 06, 2005
    Thomas, I'm sorry that you feel that way. If you have problems with VS2003, I highly encourage you log them at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/. Your feedback is very important to us as we strive to get the highest possible quality product out to our users. All issues logged at that site are usually responded to within 48 hours.

    Please keep in mind that there will always be some pains to adopting a new platform. However, migrating to new platforms is necessary as older platforms will no longer be sufficient for user requirements.

    I can't speak for VS as a whole, so I won't. In our case, we got sufficient feedback from our key target user's, i.e. Architects, that they required a more robust modeling infrastructure (read platform) and better architecture tools. The key requirement they wanted could not be fulfilled in VS2003. This was to make it easier for architects/developers to create applications that they knew would deploy in the datacenter.

    During the creation of the Distributed System Designers, to address their needs, we have been working hard to maximize the customer value and minimize the learning pain that they will encounter. If there are pains, we hope that through our Beta releases we will be able to minimize these prior to product release.

    Consequently, I hope that you have access to the Beta releases so that I can look forward to your feedback about whether we have been successful or not. Your feedback is very important to us as we strive to make sure that we can get a product out there that users love!

    Thanks
  • Anonymous
    January 06, 2005
    Don,

    How ironical, a bug with the bug reporting system! I'm not sure what your problem is as I just tried it myself and found no such issue.

    There might be a problem with your IE settings.

    Ali
  • Anonymous
    January 06, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 06, 2005
    oh, and btw:

    >> All issues logged at that site are usually >> responded to within 48 hours.

    example 1)
    opened: 2004-07-08. current status: 'under review'. 24 hours. indeed.

    example 2)
    opened: 2004-08-01. answer on 12-06, containing a remark that the problem was fixed in october (!), which still means 2 months. which if i may be so bold as to point out, is quite a bit longer than 24 hours.

    exmaple 3)
    opened: 2004-07-08. first answer (thank you for submitting this bug (!)) on 07-23. resolved on 10-15. it actually took you guys almost two weeks just to acknowledge i ever posted the bug. oh, btw: 2 weeks > 24 hours.

    i can certainly find a lot of other examples if i'd care to look. why don't you.

    so, what other interesting facts do you want me to believe?

    WM_MY0.02$
    thomas woelfer

    links to issues below (and yes, i know these are not app-designer problems, but you where pointing to ladybug in general...):

    (
    http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=72066907-45aa-4b33-b16c-d0731c8318d3

    http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=d24225a7-ec70-4ac9-adc2-2261f5eaf318

    http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=5de55341-b3b6-466e-8cd9-d871de241e2c

    )
  • Anonymous
    January 09, 2005
    Thomas,

    Thanks for your frank feedback, as much as it hurts, it helps me understand the pains that you're going through.

    Some comments:

    1. You shouldn't be developing your commercial products on our Beta 1 release. It's a bad idea as the Beta 1 release is to just give an idea of what is coming up. We ourselves have made significant changes since Beta 1. Hence, the projects that you might be working on in Beta 1 may not work in Beta 2.

    2. We try not to give dates about our releases for fear of the uncertainty involved. However, sometimes it is necessary so that our customers are not surprised.

    During the development lifecycle, as you must know, there is a lot of uncertainties and sometimes things (such as a lot of unexpected customer feedback) might cause us to redesign signficant aspects of the product that we didn't anticipate earlier.

    Trust me, internally missing a date is really frowned apon and is a decision that goes all the way up the management chain. I'm sorry that you have the impression that we treat missing dates lightly. This is definitely not the case.

    3. Lecturing you was not my intention. However, you did come up with a good point. With Team System - Architect Edition we're targeting a totally different customer segment which is architects and not developers. Therefore, Architect's requirements required us (Visual Studio Team System)to work on a new platform.

    While I'm no authority on VS in general, I know that other VS teams have to make trade-offs between fixing the previous platform and meeting new customer requirments. I would guess that it made more sense to come out with a new version as compared to focusing on a service pack.

    5. In my previous reply I should have said that we try to respond to all comments within 48 hours once they meet the pre-requisite requirements. In many cases, sometimes it takes longer than this to respond. This can happen for various reasons. Most of the time it's due the large number of feedback we have recieved from customers and the time it takes to do the investigation.

    IMHO, I think that you've been a little harsh on us at Microsoft. I do think that part of the problem is transperancy into what's going on internally. This blog I hope will help in alleviate some of that tension.

    Let me know if you have comments on the Distributed System Diagrams. I'm better equipped to answer those questions. :)

    Ali

    Disclaimer:All posting on this blog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.



  • Anonymous
    January 09, 2005
    FYI, Ramesh's blog entry has link to my old blog. It should point to my new blog and in particular the entry where I complain about the Class Designer:
    http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2004/08/class-designer-missing.html

    Looking forward to a post-Whidbey release of the CD.