Expanded Microsoft Support Lifecycle Policy for Business & Development Products
SAN DIEGO- May 25, 2004 -Today at Microsoft TechEd 2004, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Server and Tools Marketing Andrew Lees announced to attendees the June 1 launch of an expanded and enhanced product support life-cycle policy. The updated policy will provide customers with a minimum total of 10 years of mainstream and extended support for business and developer products.
Read the entire press release
This announcement affects the Support Lifecycle Policy for current and future Visual Studio and .NET Framework products. Current and future developer tool products are now eligible for 5 years of Mainstream support, and 5 years of Extended support. In the past, these products were eligible for 5 years of Mainstream support and 2 years of Extended support. Mainstream support includes support options and programs such as no-charge incident support, paid incident support, support charged on an hourly basis, support for warranty claims, and hotfix support. Extended support often includes support charged on an hourly basis and paid hotfix support.
| Q: Where can I learn more about the Microsoft Lifecycle Support Policy? A: The Microsoft Support Center publishes the Microsoft Support Lifecycle document. This document will be updated on June 1, 2004 to reflect the updates to the policy made in this announcement. |
| Q: What developer tools releases will follow the new support lifecycle policy? A: All current products in the Visual Studio family 2003 versions of Visual Studio .NET. This includes: Visual Basic .NET 2003, Visual C++ .NET 2003, Visual C# .NET 2003, Visual J# .NET 2003, Visual Studio.NET 2003 Professional edition, Visual Studio.NET 2003 Enterprise Developer edition, Visual Studio.NET 2003 Enterprise Architect edition, and the .NET Framework version 1.1. Future versions of Visual Studio (for example: Visual Studio 2005) will also follow the new support policy. |
| Q: What about Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual Studio .NET 2002 products? A: These products are unaffected by this announcement. Lifecycle dates for these products may be viewed here. |
| Q. How do I obtain support for Visual Studio family products? A. Please visit the Microsoft Product Support Center for your particular product. |