Almost two years ago I wrote a post about the abuse of the “it’s by design” answer Microsoft gives to many bugs. You know, I think that a bug in design produces the same results (if not worst) than a bug in implementation. I also had a long discussion about the reason why that specific issue should have considered a bug or not. But that’s history…

Last week I received a notification about the bug I originally posted on Connect. The last comment from MS notified me that the bug (or whatever you call it) has been fixed in SQL Server 2008. I tested it and it’s true!

I’m happy that my feedback has been accepted by Microsoft, but as always there are still a lot of space for improvements:

  • Why I received the notification only months after the release of SQL 2008?
  • Probably the bug has been fixed more than one year ago. It would have been better receiving a notification earlier, describing tha resolution of the issue in a new release of SQL Server. In this way, in case of a critical issue, I would have been able to make a plan to introduce a new release earlier just to fix the issue (or maybe it was a blocking issue to upgrade SQL2000 to SQL2005 and this would have been an important news to plan the upgrade).
  • In general: why the Connect is so disconnected from the “real” bug tracking system that MS should have to track these and other issues? It seems that Connect is handled manually by some volunteers… when they have spare time…

However, a good news today.