The wheels have been turning on my promise to investigate making hot fixes more widely available.  It hasn’t unfurled quite the way I had pictured but I’m still pretty happy with the result.  The hot fixes with be made available through http://connect.microsoft.com and downloading them will require registration so that we have some way to contact you in the event we discover a problem with the hotfix and need to notify you.  We have developed a 3 stage plan. Stage 1 is to make available a handful of VS’s most commonly distributed hot fixes – where we know there is the lowest probability of seeing regression problems.  If things go well – we get good feedback that people like having them available, we don’t run into tons of problems, etc we’ll move to stage 2.  Much to my chagrin, it turns out stage 1 won’t have any TFS hot fixes in it because none of ours are in the top handfull of requested fixes.  I don’t know, maybe that’s a good thing 🙂 but none-the-less I’m a bit disappointed because I really wanted to pilot this with TFS. In stage 2, we will expand the set of hot fixes to include all available TFS hot fixes and some additional (TBD) VS hot fixes that are less commonly requested.  In addition, we hope to roll out a customer feedback system that allows you to vote on them and give feedback on any problems you encounter with them. Finally, if all goes well again, we will expand its scope to include most if not all hot fixes that VS produces. Keep your ears and eyes open for more details.  Nothing’s done till it’s done but I’m hopeful we’ll be announcing stage 1 availability in the not too distant future. As I said in my original “Some days” post I’m not happy with the way we do everything or the pace at which we sometimes move but we listen closely and try our best to deliver what you need to be successful.  I’m proud to be part of our efforts to continually collect feedback from you and to address it to the best of our ability.  Please keep the feedback coming.  We probably can’t do everything you want us to do but if we don’t know what you want, it’s even harder.

 Brian