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Open Letter to Microsoft - Open Source Visual Studio 6.0

August 15, 2005 at 2:09 pm · Filed under General

I do a lot of Microsoft development. A lot. I use Visual Studio 6.0 to do that development. This is a product that came out on September 3, 1998. It was probably designed in 1995. I’m using a 10 year old product.

Here is the interesting thing. I started researching and getting excited about newer VS products from Microsoft. I even tried out their latest Beta of Whidbey and Visual C++ Express. The newer C++ compilers would be great to use. The debuggers handle STL better. The .Net stuff is very nice. It comes on a DVD full of stuff.

But there is a problem. Just about everyone that I email or talk to or know that REALLY does Win32 development, still uses Visual Studio 6.0. It just gets the job done. It is so solid. It supports MFC better than the newer ones. We need to generate x86 .exes. We’ve been using it for years. The system is well understood and there are still great plugins. Why?

Microsoft has been moving away from C++ for a while (more on this in another post), yet they aren’t using the newer stuff in most of the products they release (Office, Media Player, MSN Search Toolbar, etc.) As they have done this, they have deprecated or broken things in their newer Visual Studio systems that cause people to feel lost. The transition to VS.NET didn’t go well. They left a lot of the MFC, WTL, etc C++ folk in the code. Guess what? 99% of the apps people develop are done with C++/x86, not .NET. (Note, this isn’t a slam on .NET or the CLR, read on). Yet, the new tools are completely focused on the .NET segment of the house.

The benefits of moving to a newer VS are not there for this community. This C++/MFC/WTL community is still very, very large.

So, Microsoft. Rather than kill this product, give the C++ community this 10 year old IDE as Open Source, and let them maintain it. You can then focus on your new technologies and products. You did this with the WTL, and that was a good thing.

P.S. Actually, please open source Visual Studio 6.1. I work with a guy who used that product at Microsoft, and the debugger actually had the threads window as a dockable view (which makes it super easy to switch to a different thread when debugging).

P.S. Hopefully Scoble, MarkJ, or somebody at Microsoft picks this up.

plaxoed! » Open source VS? [Mark Jen’s life @ Plaxo] said,

August 16, 2005 @ 7:52 am

[...] logy — markjen @ 8:50 am 

        I saw over on Dru’s blog that he is asking Microsoft to open source Visual Studio 6.1 [...]

Anonymous Coward said,

August 16, 2005 @ 6:17 pm

VS 6.0 is probably the biggest competitor to the newer versions of VS. What incentive does MS have to opensource it?

I sympathize with your plea, but if you’re going to write an open letter to Microsoft asking them to do something, you had better make the case that doing it benefits Microsoft.

dru said,

August 17, 2005 @ 11:10 am

Here is the incentive.

Microsoft is not in the developer tool business. They are in the platform business. By opening up VS 6.0/6.1, they have given a good toolset to their developers without having 1000 programmers on the payroll.

When you get to the right level at Microsoft, I’m sure they understand that their tools group is not a profit center, it is a necessary evil for their platform to succeed.

henri adrianto said,

January 7, 2006 @ 4:03 am

i agree with your opinion. sometimes we ( student ) in indonesia trap with sales marketing software and we must use illegal software. old software it’s not bad. so i agree with you.

thanks

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