Microsoft needs to leave the cargo ship and jump aboard a speedboat
I think a lot of teeth grinding is to be expected next year in enterprises when managers wondering why there is a sudden productivity drop will have to hear that people who have been learning .NET for years now need to relearn how to work with .NET and Visual Studio!
Microsoft is moving slowly lately, in the sense that they prefer big bad updates such as the "VS 2005 / .NET 2 / SQL Server 2005 / Biztalk 2006" pack instead of regular and agile improvements. Where are .NET 1.2, .NET 1.5 or Visual Studio 2004? C# 2.0 has been ready for years and we still cannot use it for production! This is just an example.
I'm not even talking about
Apparently Microsoft is aware of the problem and I think we will see some changes next year with the Atlas project or Cω and the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework, which will be delivered as interim releases or upgrade packs... Well, at least I hope so!