Visual Studio 2005 SP1 available this December

Well it’s official. The VS2005 SP1 beta has ended and the release is set for sometime in December.

The Beta Program closed on October 30, 2006. More than 10,000 users participated in this program and we have reviewed over 350 bugs and suggestions. This feedback is important to us and we will use it to improve the overall customer experience when the Service Pack is released in December. The Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Beta is still available for download on the Microsoft Download Center.

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 will focus on addressing product issues reported since the release of Visual Studio 2005. These are types of fixes you can expect to find in this service pack:

• The Hotfixes and General Distribution Release Updates released between Visual Studio 2005 Release to Market and the end of the Service Pack customer beta period.
• Any fixes addressing security issues categorized by the Microsoft Security Response Center as “Critical”, “Important” or “Moderate”.
• Fixes for product reliability and stability issues, including those reported by customers via the Product Feedback Center, and the crashes most frequently reported via Watson.
• Fixes for common “eligible” functional issues reported by customers via the Product Feedback Center. “Eligible” functional issues are those that do not require breaking changes, architectural changes, or Design Change Request level feature work and that do not create unacceptable product quality risk and/or cost of implementation.
• Fixes for the top customer and supportability issues as reported by Customer Support Services.

As always, the goal of all of our Service Packs is to increase the overall quality of the existing product features while maintaining a high level of compatibility.