When VS.NET 2003 was announced, Microsoft made it clear that it wasn't a service pack for VS.NET 2002 you had to pay for, it was a new release and that they'd release a service pack for VS.NET 2002 'shortly' after the release of VS.NET 2003. Well... it's been 3 months now today, since VS.NET 2003 is on the market and no sign of any service pack for VS.NET 2002.
This got me thinking. First I thought: what if VS.NET 2003 is the service pack for VS.NET 2002? Then, VS.NET 2004 is the service pack for VS.NET 2003. This way, Microsoft can make money out of fixes. However, I don't think they make a lot of money on the upgrade kits they sell for 29$ a pop. No, the reason why the service pack isn't there must be something else. What I've concluded now is that Microsoft is not releasing a service pack for VS.NET 2002 at all. This will force people to migrate to VS.NET 2003 and thus .NET 1.1, because of the unpatched bugs in VS.NET 2002.
If that's true, I truly fear we'll not see any service pack for VS.NET 2003 either, because I think Microsoft will of course want to migrate the .NET developers to VS.NET 2004 and .NET 1.2 a.s.a.p. after the release of Whidbey. I hope I'm wrong and Microsoft proves me wrong by releasing the fixes for VS.NET 2002 and will commit themselves to us, customers, that they'll release fixes for the bugs in VS.NET 2003.
Of course, some people might wonder why on earth would anyone still want a service pack for VS.NET 2002. To those people I'd like to say: start talking to some VB.NET developers using VS.NET 2003 and use VS.NET 2003 yourself for 8-12 hours a day non-stop. If you ask me, I'd go back to VS.NET 2002 any day, but I can't, simply because bugs that are fixed in .NET 1.1 (and were already fixed last year!) like the bugs in the binary deserializer stop me from using .NET 1.0 in my current GUI application.
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