I always say that Microsoft is listening to their customer more than you can imagine, and this is another big sign: after a day from an announce that has worried all the developer's community, the first official Microsoft's voice is out.
Bryan Harry is speaking: "It might look like Microsoft is a huge company with infinite resources but, unfortunately, it’s not." Then, "if we go back and make VS2002 work on Vista, we have to trade that off against not making progress on Orcas. Ultimately, we balanced all of these trade-offs and came up with this plan. The plan is to support our run time environments on Vista and to support VB6, VS2005, Orcas and all future versions".
Nice to see that also a giant like Microsoft has the same problems and time constraints like us on your everyday work, but is it really a problem to support Visual Studio 2003 (not 2002 and .NET 1.0 !!) on Vista?
Ok, if I think only as a developer and a computer-lover, I can agree that we need the support for VS2005 and the future Orcas, why working with VS2003 now that we have a great environment like VS2005?
But as I've said before, the real word is a bit different... many customers have lots of rocky applications that works on .NET 1.1, they can't make an upgrade soon (the reasons are really a lot) and the NEED SUPPORT!
If VS2003 will not be supported on Vista, the consequence will be that we'll have two different environments only in order to be able to give support. It's not possible to make a conversion of all our projects from VS2003 to VS2005 only for running Vista and give a pleasure to our eyes.
Instead, why not releasing a next SP2 for Visual Studio 2003 that permits us to run it on Vista? I'm sure that a giant like Microsoft can make this miracle... 