Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services – epic fail

I think it’s really about time that VS2008, which is the development flagship, gets up to speed and starts enabling developers!

The push from MS has for a long time been 64-bit…go 64-bit OS…64-bit, 64-bit and then a bit more 64-bit.

But where is the support? honestly guys! for systems to move onto 64-bit, you need to ENABLE those that work with it to actually be capable of working with it.

The latest release, Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services is IMHO an epic fail..

Two reasons:

1) still has to work on Windows Server 2003 even though it’s considering best practises to seperate development machines and servers.

2) 64-bit is as of yet, not in scope..yes that’s right, 64-bit isn’t supported in the latest release.

 

Alex Malek’s response to this was “Unfortunately, 64-bit is not in scope at the moment. Along with support for WinXP/Vista, this is at the very top of our list of pain points we hope to address in subsequent releases.”

that’s simply just not good enough….not in scope? i mean, did we just wake up this morning to find that 64-bit had evolved over night?

another_major_gripe

That goes without saying…this now pushes the adoption rate out again for Visual Studio 2008. I know it’s probably a mad rush to get VS2008 out the door and the tools should follow shortly after. Yet again, those who have adopted 64-bit is stuck again and i now have to create yet another development environment (virtual of course) so i can have these extensions implemented – time == money == implementation == adoption == sales…it’s an easy equation.

And i was seriously looking forward to being able to use Visual Studio 2008 out-of-the-box for SharePoint development.

Dissapointed..seriously dissapointed that this is the stance that’s been taken by the SharePoint Designer team.

One for the road…

rubbing_it_in

Can we find a date, preferably before Visual Studio 2012 gets released, which will let us know if we should even bother with Visual Studio 2008, not to forget 64-bit, at this stage?

Published Wed, Jul 2 2008 8:32 by Brian Madsen
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Comments

# re: Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services – epic fail

Tuesday, July 01, 2008 10:18 PM by Daniel Reed

Yeah, couldn't agree more. What the hell is with this?

At my company we decided to write our own templates for VS2008. And it works in 64 bit no problem. At this rate, we will have a better product than Microsoft.

Honestly Microsoft. What can be so hard to get working? Get your priorities straight

# re: Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services – epic fail

Thursday, July 03, 2008 4:06 AM by Peter

It is ridiculous that these still don't support 64 bit.  We even contacted our MS rep and asked why and he replied that they do work, so we had to send him a copy of the error screen to convince him.  His answer, 'They don't support 64 bit OS with these extensions'

# re: Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services – epic fail

Thursday, July 03, 2008 6:55 PM by Brian Madsen

In my opinion it's a fail...a fail to not involve the community..a fail to not think ahead...a fail to knowingly release them without the support for 64-bit.

i'm terribly dissapointed as there's definitely no excuses that can be made as to why it wasn't attended to. And it certainly can't be said there isn't enough avenues available to this product team in order to get feedback.

Not only is the MOSS developmer community growing..and growing fast...but there's some 5000 MVPs out there as well who willingly, alongside the community, will provide feedback.

No, this was released without proper analysis - it just takes 1 Live Search or Google Search to come to the realisation that there was a mistake made. The amount of blogs and forum entries today that mention this is growing by the hour.

It honestly also shouldn't be that hard to get the installer to work with 64-bit. Third party extension providers are doing it already. Just look at JetBrains' ReSharper or hell even a free tool like GhostDoc (Weigelt's Ghostdoc 2.1.x) supports 64-bit easily enough.

One way to definitely avoid these epic fails is to put the information out there as early as possible (before release) and get some feedback...invite people to private betas/CTPs etc..how come this wasn't done for something as monumental as these extensions?

# re: Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services – epic fail

Tuesday, September 16, 2008 4:33 AM by steven

http://dotnet.org.za/rodent/

# re: Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services – epic fail

Tuesday, September 16, 2008 4:58 AM by Brian Madsen

Hey Steven,

thanks heaps for the link - will definitely try that solution out tonight.

as an afterthought, put your blog url into the "website" so i can link to your blog. i also tend to "vet" most visitors that appear "anonymous" very stricktly as i get an awful lot of spam these days. Community Server catches most of them but some do slip through from time to time.

Again, thanks for the link buddy..appreciated!