We continue to drive for improvements – trying to make contact with every person who reports issues (via my blog, Connect, Surveys, etc.).  We’re released on “Super-Limited Community Technology Preview” to individuals who have reported problems and are on the brink of releasing another.

Every day we are seeing wins.  One of the many issues we’ve been tracking the last few weeks has been that localized/international installs were substantially slower than English (yeah, I know you are thinking that would be hard :)) – on the order of 2 times slower in some cases.  Just this morning I got word that a WPF improvement has been tested and we are now nearly at parity with English.  There’s also a resource loading fix in the pipe that should erase any remaining issues.  It looks like one more problem is down and we’ll keep cranking on the rest.

I thought I’d share a few quotes we received from customers who have tried out the LCTP1 build.  I’ve asked for numerical data in addition to anecdotal but the anecdotal also makes a nice read.

  • Scrolling performance seems much better; it's now actually usable with a single core enabled and a lot better with 2 cores as well! Awesome! Scrolling using PgDown/PgUp also seems a lot better, particularly with 2 cores it seems pretty snappy.
  • I think you’ve absolutely identified the issue and I appreciate you working with me on this.  VS2010 ROCKS!
  • They’ve improved things so much for me that it has become hard to reproduce the problem!
  • It's still a lot better than on beta2. It is much, much appreciated!!!!
  • Overall I'm seeing improvement on the performance front, but my ability to assess that is still noticeably impeded by stability and functional issues.
  • Stack overflow crash on converting a particular Makefile project.
  • Stepping speed in disassembly view is improved now that 511266 has been fixed, but it is still unsatisfactory.

We are also making a big push to get all of our internal dogfooders to update to SLCTP 2 and will be following up with a survey once people have had time to get a feel for it.  We’ve picked up several key dogfooding teams that we’re working closely with on their experience, including: Expression, Exchange and CodePlex in addition to the Visual Studio teams.

We’re not done but it’s good to see some progress.  SLCTP 2 should be better and by the time we get a more broadly available RC out after the first of the year, I’m very optimistic that the problem will be gone and Beta 2 will have proven very successful in helping us make sure we ship a great product.

Brian