I was just reading the lastest MSDN UK Flash newsletter, and was very interested in the survey results.  For the uninitiated, each issue of the Flash contains a survey that readers can respond to.  In the next issue, they show the results of that survey.  The most recent survey question was "What would interest you most around new versions of Visual Studio?" and the largest response (34%) was for "Stability, Reliability, Performance".  I find this quite surprising.

In the 8 years I worked at Microsoft, I went through several versions of Visual Studio, including pre-release builds a lot of the time, and I must say I always found its stability and reliability pretty good.  Performance was never a problem for me either.  This was also true in my life before Microsoft.

But in all those roles I actually installed Visual Studio myself, from a disc or from the network using Microsoft's supplied setup.exe.  In addition, I never had cause to install any non-Microsoft add-in for Visual Studio.

Recently I've been using Visual Studio on a machine managed by a customer of mine.  They use a 3rd-party packaging system to deploy everything to their managed desktops.  I don't know the details of how this works, but I'm guessing that it's some kind of registry/filesystem snapshot.

It's clear to anyone that's installed Visual Studio from a disc that the process is considerably more complex that dumping stuff straight into the registry and the filesystem.  Maybe it shouldn't be - I could happily support that view - but it's clear that it is more complex than that.  Otherwise why on earth would it take so long, and why would it display messages like "generating scripts"...?

So if we accept that VS is somehow "hard to install" we should probably believe that any 3rd-party packaging tool is unlikely to deduce all the correct logic to use when installing VS.  In fact, I find VS decidedly less stable on this managed desktop than I've ever found it to be in the past, on systems where I used Microsoft's setup.exe.

Also, this managed desktop has several add-ins for VS installed.  Occasionally VS has crashed and I've caught it in WinDbg, so I know it was at least one of the add-ins that caused the problem.  I guess that VS has become a platform in its own right and people are blaming it for faults in components that they've installed on top.

Microsoft used to get the blame for all blue screens in Windows but I think these days most users realise that it's more likely to be a 3rd-party device driver at fault.  Microsoft had to educate its customers by capturing data about their software failures and publishing data about the results.  Kind of like "naming and shaming" except I don't think they ever published the names of the culprits.

I wonder how many of the survey respondents were using some "odd" deployment tool, or some 3rd-party add-in.  Did they think about whose code was running when they experienced those stability issues?

So this survey result makes me think that perhaps the most useful features in future versions of VS would be to capture and publish data about which add-ins are crashing it, and to simplify the setup to the extent that a simple registry/filesystem snapshot is all you need to deploy it reliably.