This is making the rounds lately and it seems to have many developers up in arms - and semi-understandably so.  Somasegar recently announced that while Visual Studio version 2005 (with SP1) would be supported on Windows Vista, Visual Studio 2002/2003 would NOT.  When I first read that it took me aback.  What?  How could they not support them?  I use both VS 2003 and VS 2005 on a daily basis and am planning on moving to Vista promptly.

First of all, let me be clear about this (and this seems to be something of a point of confusion):  Visual Studio 2002/2003 (the products) will not be supported on Windows Vista.  This does not mean that .NET 1.1 applications will not be supported - they WILL.  Even then, that doesn't mean that VS 2002/2003 won't work on Vista...they just won't be supported.

As you're no doubt aware, the Microsoft Windows team has done a tremendous amount of work around security and the locking down of the operating system for the Vista release, many of the changes impact the way that applications (particularly debuggers) work on the OS.

Scott Guthrie has the following to say (taken from Dennis van der Stelt's blog) :

The big technical challenge is with enabling scenarios like advanced debugging. Debuggers are incredibly invasive in a process, and so changes in how an OS handles memory layout can have big impacts on it. Vista did a lot of work in this release to tighten security and lock down process/memory usage - which is what is affecting both the VS debugger, as well as every other debugger out there. Since the VS debugger is particularly rich (multi-language, managed/native interop, COM + Jscript integration, etc) - it will need additional work to fully support all scenarios on Vista. That is also the reason we are releasing a special servicing release after VS 2005 SP1 specific to Vista - to make sure everything (and especially debugging and profiling) work in all scenarios. It is actually several man-months of work (we've had a team working on this for quite awhile). Note that the .NET 1.1 (and ASP.NET 1.1) is fully supported at runtime on Vista. VS 2003 will mostly work on Vista. What we are saying, though, is that there will be some scenarios where VS 2003 doesn't work (or work well) on Vista - hence the reason it isn't a supported scenario. Instead, we recommend using a VPC/VM image for VS 2003 development to ensure 100% compat. Hope this helps - even if the answer isn't entirely what we'd all like it to be, Scott

I've been considering making my primary development environment on a VPC anyway - maybe this is the way I'll have to go in the Vista timeframe.