I am eager for the next version of VS.NET and I find delays disappointing, but I rely on my IDE to do my job, make my job easier, help me be a better programmer, and keep me productive.

I am also responsible for writing code. I don't like to release it before I am comfortable that it will be reliable. I am definitely a proponent of agile software development. Creating a specification and due date and feeling bound to it seems as unrealistic to me as deciding what your child's college major and cumulative GPA will be as soon as you get a positive pregnancy test.

I am impatient for VS.NET, but it is being designed by other programmers, people like the rest of us, and I am glad that their concept and the scope of their project is evolving during its creation. No company should incur liabilities for buggy software in order to meet a deadline.

I don't feel obliged to suck up to Microsoft or its developers because they are a large, influential corporation, but I don't feel obliged to feel oppressed by them, resent them, and villify them, either.

Like Lucy Van Pelt told Charlie Brown, "Learn to relax. 5¢ please."

>Well if it is very specific day, then why doesn't Microsoft let everyone know? Unless of course it might not be ready by that time, in which case you can't claim that Microsoft really knows when it will be ready.
>
>In regards to the stability of Beta 2, that's great, but I bought VS 2003 weeks before Beta 2 came out, and at the time I couldn't find any definite information on Beta 2 or the full release of VS 2005.
>
>I'm not really upset by any of this, but it's definitely not the ideal case when Microsoft can't publish firm release dates for it's products...
>
>Regards,
>
>Brian Vander Plaats