You may have read some of my previous posts about my shame around the job we have done servicing and providing patches for TFS 2005.  We've had problems both with timeliness and reliability of patches.  I promised that we would not let that happen again for TFS 2008.  I intend to keep that promise.  We've been working hard on servicing for months now.  Today, we have the first visible result of that effort.  We are releasing a first round of 6 patches that can be applied against TFS 2008 Beta 2 client and server installs.  These patches fix real bugs Beta 2 but not all of them are ones that are critical enough that we would normally release patches for them.  Our primary goal here is to practice producing patches for the product so that by the time we ship we've worked out all the kinks and can do it smoothly and quickly when an real need to patch the product arises.

The patches are:

TFS Server

  • KB941952 - Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server Beta 2 - Version Control Branch/Merge operations have unexpected behavior
  • KB942080 - Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server Beta 2 - Deleting and re-adding Team Foundation Server global groups with the same name without closing the global groups dialog does not actually delete the original group

Team Explorer Client

  • KB942039 - FIX: Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer Beta 2 - Incorrect folder handling for Web Projects 
  • KB942072 - Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer Beta 2 - Incorrect prompt to save during WPF builds 
  • KB942048 - Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer Beta 2 - Web Projects no longer appear in Version Control and Annotating a file under source control hangs Visual Studio 

Team Build Server

  • KB942082 - Visual Studio 2008 Team Build Beta 2 - Builds fail after renaming the build definition

Because our primary goal is to test the patches and make sure they work, we need your help.  If you've installed Beta 2, please take a few minutes to install these patches and report back your results.  We want to know about anything that did not go totally smoothly.  Just getting this far has uncovered a plethora of issues both technical and procedural.  The next step is to see how it works in the "real world".

In another week or two, we plan to release another round of 6 or 7 patches that will use some updated installer technology.  Keep an eye out for that coming down the pipe.  With your help, we will make sure that servicing for TFS 2008 works really smoothly before we ship the product.

Thank you,

Brian