I was up late last night refining a bug report for an issue I discovered in Visual Studio 2005. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to report issues for 2005 on Microsoft Connect.
Ok, I thought, let's reproduce the issue on a version which is still accepting feedback. So I went ahead and downloaded the Express version of Visual Studio 2008. I should have known that they labeled it "Express" for a reason:
- Visual Assist X doesn't support Express
- Instead of devenv.exe, the IDE executable is called VCExpress.exe
- VCExpress.exe does not support command line builds!
What the latter item especially amounted to was much time wasted editing and refining my test case. Written in Perl and originally targeting Visual Studio 2005, it uses devenv.exe to perform a series clean and build cycles, which is the only way to demonstrate the race condition easily in a repeatable fashion.
Luckily, earlier in the day I had installed the recently released Visual Studio 2010 RC. I was also able to reproduce the issue there, so that is where I finally filed the Connect ticket.
I appreciate the steps Microsoft has been taking to make their product feedback process more transparent and accessible to users. However, imposing version-based limitations to file issues that may well be unresolved across several iterations of a product will discourage users from reporting bugs - many / most users probably would have given up when they saw that tickets were no longer being accepted for Visual Studio 2005, or whatever versions they actually have a license for.
Of course, I realize there are business and practical reasons Microsoft might be doing this. It just may be counterproductive in certain cases - clearly, this is the case for carry-over bugs.