Although VS 2010 Beta 2 hasn’t been released yet, Microsoft has stopped fixing the certainly minor bugs that I have reported in the last days about the C# file code model. Instead they are currently focused “on stabilizing and improving the performance of VS2010”. This is something that has happened in the past (I remember since VS 2005): once the Beta 2 is released no feature is changed and very few bugs are fixed (only the big ones that would prevent the release of the product), but I think that this time is worse, the facts are:

• VS 2010 Beta 1 was not feature completed (the customization of toolbars was disabled for Beta 1, for example)
• It had important bugs in the new WPF commandbar model
• VS 2010 Beta 2 is not released yet, but some bugs won’t be fixed until VS 11 !

Too bad. I’m talking about minor bugs that should be easy to fix, not ones requiring architectural changes that I understand will be postponed.

I find quite stressing what will happen if the WPF commandbars are not fixed correctly for Beta 2, or new bugs appear with features that were not completed in Beta 1. I’d rather see no CTPs at all and a longer series of betas instead:

• Beta 1: quite feature completed. Time to complete it and fix bugs.
• Beta 2: feature completed. Time to fix bugs.
• Beta 3: bugs fixed. Time to focus on stabilization and performance.
• RC1, etc.

At least we would have two beta cycles to get bugs fixed.

All that said, I welcome the focus on the performance of the Visual Studio (the 2005 release was quite bad in this regard).

UPDATE: Microsoft clarified that this affects only to bugs in the code model because they are investing in a new code model. See Clarification on my previous post “Microsoft no longer fixing (small) bugs for VS 2010”

The little problem that I reported when using the SetTabPicture method with a 32-bit bitmap with alpha channel for transparency has been fixed according to the last notification from Microsoft for the following VS 2010 beta build:

EnvDTE.Window.SetTabPicture doesn’t support 32-bit bitmaps with transparency in alpha channel when toolwindow not active
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=470236

That means that for the first time a Visual Studio version (2010) will support 32-bit bitmap with alpha channel for transparency both for add-in command pictures (EnvDTE.DTE.AddNamedCommand) and toolwindow pictures (EnvDTE.Window.SetTabPicture), and you can get rid of magenta (RGB=255,0,255) and almost green (RGB=0,254,0) hacks in add-ins, which is really great and very close to the support for icons with built-in transparency that I have been battling for all these years. I don’t care if I have to use 32-bit bitmaps with alpha channel instead of icons. It is also great because in most cases the toolwindow picture is the same than the picture of the command that shows the toolwindow, so you can use the same picture without re-colorizing the background from green to magenta or transparent when calling SetTabPicture, or providing two versions of the same picture with different backgrounds.

The only problem is if you still have to support old versions of Visual Studio (2005, 2008) which I guess will be the case for most commercial add-ins because VS 2010 doesn’t support the RGB=0,254,0 color for command picture transparency that was used in those versions, this issue is still active at the time of this writing (Update (August 6): VS 2010 Beta 2 will support RGB=0,254,0 too for backwards compatibility):

Custom pictures in CommandBarButtons created by add-in don’t show a transparent background
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=461192