Microsoft is readying not one, but two, service packs for its Visual Studio tool suite.

The company is readying simultaneously Service Pack (SP) 1 for Visual Studio 2003 and SP1 for Visual Studio 2005, blogged Scott Wiltamuth, Visual C# product unit manager.. Both are expected to ship in the first part of 2006. The specific target for Visual Studio 2003 SP1 is April 2006. Wiltamuth offered no further details on the planned timing for SP1 for Visual Studio 2005.

Wiltamuth made the particulars regarding Microsoft's Visual Studio SP plans public on Monday, the same day that Microsoft launched officially its Visual Studio 2005 product, as part of its application-platform unveiling in San Francisco.

Just days before Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006, some developers reported on their blogs problems they were encountering with the final Visual Studio 2005 integrated development environment (IDE) code.

While Microsoft officials maintained on Monday that the company stood by its code, they also acknowledged that the company was working on a first service pack for Visual Studio 2005. But they declined to provide any further details, such as the ship target for Visual Studio 2005 SP1 and/or specific bugs that it will fix.

A couple of posters commenting on Wiltamuth's post expressed disappointment with the long lag time between Visual Studio 2003 and the first service pack for that product.

"We have to wait until the middle of next year for a VS 2003 service pack?" posted Adam Young. "I don't really understand this, bearing in mind how long VS 2003 has already been out. I work in a bank where the standard desktop is updated at about the speed of a glacier moving over a mountain. We won't be moving to VS 2005 until the rollout of XP service pack 2 and .net fx 2. Which won't be for a very long time. So I guess I'm stuck with the VS2003 bugs for the best part of another year. Sigh."

But other posters thanked Wiltamuth for being forthcoming with details on the Visual Studio team's SP plans.

Meanwhile, on the Microsoft Channel 9 Web site, posters debated whether Microsoft should have fixed more bugs before shipping Visual Studio 2005. One poster, "LeighSword," claimed, "Don't worry, all things on the schedule, VS2005, VS2006(service pack), VS2008, VS2009(service pack)......."

CEO Ballmer said during the San Francisco launch Tuesday that Microsoft needs to step up its development/delivery pace on the tools front. But Microsoft officials did not commit publicly to a release schedule for future iterations of Visual Studio. The next major release of Visual Studio that is on the books is "Orcas," which some Microsoft observers have taken to calling "Visual Studio 2007."

In a related development, there had been some speculation that Microsoft might designate something known as "MQ," a Visual Studio 2005 quality milestone, as SP1 for Visual Studio 2005.

Microsoft C# blogger Eric Maino kicked off that speculation with a post on his site that identified MQ as "a milestone that is post-Whidbey and pre-Orcas that will focus on quality."

On Monday, however, Maino denied that MQ is in any way connected with Visual Studio 2005 SP1.

"MQ is not about servicing Whidbey, Maino blogged.. The MQ milestone is about changing processes and making improvements on these processes. It is NOT about code churn, adding features, or fixing known bugs in VS2005. …MQ is about internal improvements to our teams, our tools and our processes."