During the past few months, the Visual C++ team allocated many of its development resources towards addressing bugs submitted through the MSDN Feedback Center.  In fact, almost 90% of these bugs were fixed and will ship as part of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (also known as SP1).  Our goal is to be the best provider of development tools and your use of the MSDN Feedback Center has been instrumental to that end. 

The MSDN Feedback Center has also been beneficial in driving product strategy.  In analyzing bug submissions, we realized that a significant number of these issues resulted from architectural limitations in some of our older pieces of technology.  Historically, our approach has been to apply point fixes to these fragile subsystems.  After careful review, however, we have decided to take on the task of updating these systems with a modern architecture.  The result should be not only better quality, but faster performance and higher productivity as well.  

Since this approach addresses entire categories of bugs, we have chosen to limit some of the fixes we make to these subsystems.  Instead of continuing to patch old code, we will dedicate resources towards implementing the new architecture.  We believe this represents an investment that will yield significant benefits for customers in the long term.   Understand that this does not mean we will ignore MSDN Feedback Center submissions nor that you should stop reporting bugs.  In fact, we have recently created a team focused on resolving serious customer issues.  It does mean, however, that we will establish a clear set of guidelines for approving both customer and internally reported issues.  By adopting this approach, we can make progress on a modern design while addressing the most severe problems.  

To help you understand this process, and optimize your MSDN Feedback Center submissions, we are providing a set of submission guidelines.  These guidelines are designed to help the dedicated servicing staff quickly prioritize issues and generate fixes that benefit the largest number of customers.  Of course, you can always use the MSDN forums to collaborate with Microsoft developers, MVPs and beta testers to identify problems and workarounds.

Bug Submission Guidelines

    You can view the bug submission guidelines here.

Again, thank you for the valuable feedback.  Through the MSDN Feedback Center, you have provided us with a better understanding of the issues faced when using Visual C++.  More importantly, your feedback has helped highlight key feature areas where we need to modernize.  By providing insight into our development plans we hope to continue the dialog established through the MSDN Feedback Center and build a great future for Visual C++.

Sincerely,

The Visual C++ Team