Microsoft (Quote, Chart) confirmed it's on track to release Visual Studio 2005 in November, backing itself up with the release of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the development tool on Monday.

Microsoft released the beta 2 version of the software in April, as well as .NET Framework 2.0 beta 2, and the April Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2005.

Now, close to the November ship date, Microsoft must convince its most engaged developers that the product is good enough to ship.

As Visual Studio client development manager Shawn Burke put it on his own blog, the challenge Microsoft's Visual Studio team faces is: "How do I ship quality software that will do the right thing for my users and still close it down and get it out the door with known issues? You could literally keep at it forever if you kept fixing all the bugs."

On the MSDN Product Feedback Blog, product manager Marie Hagman wrote about "bug triage," the process of deciding which bugs to fix and which to ignore.