Everything you want to know about Visual Studio ALM and Farming
Brian Harry is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server. Learn more about Brian.
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Since I posted my offer to hook you up with one of the Super-Limited Community Technology Preview builds, I have received a number of requests. I'm happy to do it but I want to clarify one thing. A few people seem to have the assumption that the build will be more stable than Beta 2 and therefore a great upgrade for their daily use. It's possible, but it's not likely. That's not why we are distributing them. We are distributing them so that people can test if specific issues that they reported in Beta 2 (particularly performance) have been addressed for them.
When we ship a Beta, we go through a multi-week stabilization period designed to gradually improve the quality by reducing the churn and fixing/avoiding regressions. The SLCTP builds have no such period. They are just daily builds that have passed the nightly verification tests. That means they should mostly work but there could be very bad regressions lurking that haven't been discovered yet. We get hundreds of checkins every day and any one of them could introduce a serious but not immediately obvious regression.
If you tried Beta 2 and you experienced (and hopefully reported) a specific issue and you want to verify that the issue is gone (and are prepared to re-report it if it is not), then an SLCTP build might be for you. If you are hoping for a new build that will just overall improve your development experience over Beta 2, the SLCTPs are not for you. We are working on a plan to provide another more broadly available better stabilized pre-release VS 2010 build. That will be your best shot at an overall better experience.
We greatly appreciate your help in tracking down the remaining issues so that we can ship a great product!
Brian
Why don't you simply release nightly builds for everyone, without all this ceremony?
Those wishing to use cutting edge stuff can use the nightlies, those wishing a somewhat stable build can use the beta, the early production adopters can use the RTM version when it is released and those requiring a stable production build should wait until SP1.
Modern software developers simply expect regular releases.
Have any of your customers asked you not to release the nightlies?
My guess is DevDiv doesn't currently have the infrastructure or processes necessary to do nightly builds.
It's one thing to compile and test software nightly. It's quite another to automatically deploy it (say, for MSDN subscriber downloads or Microsoft Update patching).
But I echo your statement, Eamon - that is something I'd like to see in Vnext!
My guess is DevDiv doesn't currently have the infrastructure or processes necessary to publish nightly builds.
Sorry - I meant *publish* nightly builds. :)
*sigh*
Anyways, Brian, thank you for keeping us up-to-date on the progress with VS2010. The transparency helps quite a bit with my overall impression of the next release.
By any chance, is it possible to see a report (documentation, or Channel9 interview, etc.) on the work that was required to convert VS2010 to use WPF as the root window? A lot of people in the enterprise market - with large "legacy" investments, would benefit from that information, myself included.
Brian,
I'm greatly looking forward to VS2010, enjoy the beta (especially of TFS 2010), and cannot begin to appreciate the size, complexity and effort involved in producing VS.
Thanks to all on the team.
Lars,
Paul Harrington gave a talk at PDC that covers this:
http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/CL09
Note that all PDC sessions are available. The entire list is at:
http://microsoftpdc.com/Videos
tony
I wonder what is the statistic of peoples activity. As for me, I'm a psychologist and learn the behaviour of people. You know people do something only if they can personally benefit from it. That is why it is interesting to me if there've been a lot of people who tested and send it their conclusions.
Hi all, I'm too greatly looking forward to VS2010, enjoy the beta (especially of TFS 2010), and cannot begin to appreciate the size, complexity and effort involved in producing VS.