Your Bugs Are Our Top Priority
It's true. Believe it or not. When you submit a bug report related to Visual Studio through https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio, they become our top priority. They're higher priority than even our own internally submitted bugs! We also track suggestions for improvements through this same process.
The other day I submitted a bug directly into the ASP.NET team's bug database about the fact that the Visual Studio command View.ViewCode doesn't work with .aspx files (or any file in a Web Project), I was told "Sorry, but we don't have time to fix this. Customer bugs have higher priority and we haven't seen this from customers yet.". I was shocked! I mean, I'm a customer, perhaps internal to Microsoft, but I'm using the product, right? There you have it, external customer bugs, your bugs, get fixed over our own internal submissions.
Of course if we find a really serious bug internally, like a crash or data loss, we'll definitely fix it. But generally your bugs are fixed first.
We're tracked across the company on our response rates and fix rates to customer bugs. 90% (or more) of customer bugs fixed is a good target to hit for most teams. Of course many issues submitted are suggestions, bugs that are really obfuscated, or issues we'll fix in a future version.
If you do submit a bug, please be patient! We will read and reply to your issue, but sometimes it takes team members a little while to investigate the issue, figure out what's going on, and get a reply back. We try to reply within a week, but some issues just take more time along with all the coding, planning, and other stuff going on.
When you enter a bug using connect, it goes straight into our main bug database. It even has special workflow associated in that we have to investigate it and reply back before it can be closed. Having them in the database, as opposed to just e-mail, ensures they're tracked and get assigned to right people (there are over 2,500 people who are involved in creating .NET & Visual Studio). If it is a suggestion, we add them to our list of ideas for the next version. The #1 blocker to this process is us not being able to reproduce the bug. So please be sure to provide very clear, well formulated repro steps. Including a screen recoding is a big plus (use the free WME9).
(Visual Studio Orcas is currently headed for a Beta, but you can try the CTPs now. We (DevDiv) are trying to drop bits more regularly specifically to get your feedback.)
So here's a call to everyone out there... Help us out!! Please submit your suggestions and bugs. I'm personally a big fan of solid & reliable products, and we need your help to really accomplish that. You may have heard of the infamous "Microsoft v1 Product", well that reputation improves by real people in the real world (aka you) using our products and providing your feedback. Thank you.