Q&A: Visual Studio 2005 Refresh Helps Developers Take Full Advantage of Windows Vista
"Soma" Somasegar, chief of Microsoft's Developer Division, discusses opportunities and benefits that customers and partners can experience by harnessing the power of Windows Vista to build secure, reliable and connected applications.
Context & Ripple Effects
This Q&A lands at the end of a long tooling-to-OS alignment arc: Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 were RTM'd back in October 2005 (Microsoft RTMs Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005), but the operating system they were meant to showcase slipped repeatedly enough that analysts mined Windows 2000 and XP release history to model Vista's delays (Vista's schedule under scrutiny). With Vista finally shipping, Microsoft has spent months courting the long tail — it began evangelizing the platform to small ISVs in mid-2006 (small-ISV Vista evangelism) — and this week's push has been characteristically broad, down to a Robert Fripp-composed Vista startup melody on Channel 9 days earlier.
The refresh itself is Developer Division chief Soma Somasegar's answer to a practical gap: developers holding a year-and-a-half-old IDE need updated templates and support to build against Vista's new surfaces, including the Sidebar and gadget model Microsoft is simultaneously populating with Live Search gadgets. The interview framing — secure, reliable, connected applications — ties the tooling message directly to Vista's headline features.
First-order effects
- Developers and ISVs building for Windows Vista get an updated Visual Studio 2005 with first-class support for Vista-specific APIs like the Sidebar gadget platform, lowering the cost of targeting the new OS.
- Microsoft's own Live Search gadgets shipping into the Vista Sidebar give partners a working reference implementation of exactly the kind of application the refreshed tools are meant to produce.
Second-order effects
- The small ISVs Microsoft began courting in 2006 gain a concrete reason to prioritize Vista development, since the tooling barrier that favored waiting is removed — shifting their roadmap decisions toward gadget-style, always-on-desktop experiences.
- Competing development-tool vendors face pressure to match native Vista integration, because Microsoft can bundle OS-level feature support into its IDE faster than third parties can retrofit theirs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, each Windows release cycle becomes a forcing function for the installed base of Visual Studio customers, reinforcing a system-level moat where the OS, tools, and runtime are upgraded as one decision rather than three.
The trend: After years of schedule slips, Microsoft is leaning on its developer-tools franchise as the primary lever to pull the software ecosystem onto newly shipped versions of Windows.