Thanks Gareth for the catch, the two ideas are now merged.

@superbecio I believe a built-in chat could take advantage of context inside VS which an external IM couldn’t. Image for example this scenario: you download an open source project like NHibernate, you open the solution → right click → Chat and a chat tool window popus up already logged into the NHibernate chat room with NHibernate devs and users.

This is only one of a few cool scenarios we’ve been toying with when brainstorming about this feature. Rest assured, we’re not just thinking about embedding an external IM. We highly believe in using the current “context” and maybe “history” of your dev habits to make clever choices, etc.

I agree voice and doc sharing are also important. But text chat is not bad either ;)

@superbecio We see value in not having to share your personal IM (or managing several IM aliases) with different teams just for the sake of having a chat inside VS. We also envision there could be public (IRC-like channel) chat rooms with popular topics like “Silverlight”, etc where anyone could join for a quick question or just to hang around…

Of course this needs to be smooth enough as to “just work” to avoid you the burden of handling just-another-IM-client. Agreed on the perf notes you mention.