Tool lag

One of the problems of having a collection of tools that interoperate is that there’s often a lag between when a tool will interoperate with the latest version of another tool. I’m hardly a bleeding-edge tool junky, I wait until RTM before I start using the latest Visual Studio on a daily basis, and in the case of VC 6 I stuck with it (as did most of my clients) until VS2005 came out and actually improved life for unmanaged C++ development… However, it seems that some tools take a long long time to catch up with Visual Studio. Take DevPartner Studio, for example, it seems that it’s always lagging by just enough that I spend more time using it in my “legacy” compiler builds than I do in my day to day builds. It’s cool that it works on x64 now but it’s less cool that I have to use VS2005 or VS2008 to use it…

The problem with tools that lag is that no matter how useful they are the lag and the lack of daily use affects the usefulness of the tool and that always gets evaluated when I have to pay more money for another year of ‘support’…

When a tool isn’t in the tool box that you use daily you tend to use it less often than you should… Yes, the reason for this rant is that I’ve just found a couple of leaks with DevPartner that lived a little longer than they should because I’m developing the code in VS2010 and DevPartner isn’t there in the toolbar nagging at me to use it. And, yes I know that I’m the one at fault for not using the tool anyway even though it’s easier to ignore right now…

This kind of thing usually isn’t actually too much of a problem for me as using these kinds of tools is on my release check-list but as I get clients that only want VS2010 builds it gets more likely that the tool lag will bite.

So, in summary, a version of DevPartner Studio for Visual Studio 2010 would be nice and, even better, if you can’t ship with the RTM of the compiler then a roadmap that gives a hint about when you might ship, or even a hand wavey indication of an intention to ship, would be nice…