I wrote about this problem before – Microsoft’s service packs for any product take forever to come out and in the meantime the users have to struggle with the bugs. Note that all along, for many of the issues, Microsoft already has a patch – they just don’t want to distribute patches one by one. I understand the motivation: Microsoft is trying to avoid “patch hell” with this policy. Makes sense, if you’re an end user.

But take developer tools as an example. Developers are in general more careful and more computer literate than end users, thus with a suitable disclaimer it should be no problem to issue patches for the development tools like Visual Studio, compilers and such. Yet it hasn’t happened. Till now.

There is a pilot program where you can download patches for Visual Studio, .NET and related compilers. You decide if the patch is appropriate and you are taking the risk because the patch has not been tested on all 2 million languages and whatnot, but it’s up to you, not Microsoft to decide when to try the patch.

Great move. I wish they’d started doing that sooner, I remember how just a few years ago there were known and patched problems with the C++ compiler that my company needed. We got the fixes, but had to go through quite a few hoops.