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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I've written extensively in the last few weeks about the feedback we've gotten from our Beta 2. I hope you can tell we've heard your feedback, we are taking it very seriously and are committed to shipping a product that you love. I'm grateful for all of the feedback you've given. I'm also grateful to all of you who have been able to pick up Super-Limited Community Technology Preview (SLCTP) builds.
As we look at the feedback we've gotten and the improvements we've made, we're convinced we need another round of broad feedback. As such we're announcing some changes to the 2010 end game. The driving force is the inclusion of a publicly available, "go-live", supported Release Candidate in February. We believe we'll have the vast majority of the feedback addressed in time for the release candidate and will be looking for another broad round of feedback to ensure it is ready.
We will also be producing an SLCTP3 build in mid January for one more private, non-disclosure agreement, round of validation by those of you who would like to validate that the highest priority issues have been resolved. Given that the RC will only be a few weeks later, I'm not expecting too many people to opt for it, but at a minimum, we'll be updating our internal dogfooders with it to ensure we are ready for the RC.
As part of accomodating this public release candidate, we will be moving the planned launch date back a few weeks.
Thanks ton for all the feedback you've given so far. Please keep it coming and we'll keep addressing it.
Brian
Wise decision!
That's a really great news ! Can't wait to have it in my hands :-) Thank you for sharing infos with us
Great decision!!
Agreed - good move!
That's good to hear , expecting to improve performance
Brian, will all the 2010 components have an RC version? (TFS, MTLM, Power Tools,...) What about the path from Beta 2 to RC? Thanks, Bob
We are still working out exactly which components will ship with RC. Definitely yes on VS Ultimate, Test Elements, TFS, etc. We're looking at Power Tools - probably we'll update them. We are also looking are how many of the VS SKUs (Ultimate, Premium, Pro, and numerous Express) we need to release. I expect that by early Jan, we'll have it settled.
I Brian,
i think it's a great idea!
I've only this doubt : Does this decision will shift RTM after the end of march?
Thank you very much
Wise move. I'm glad to know that quality comes first even over making your ship date.
1. Any estimates when RTM will be available if not on March 22?
2. I am not sure I understand the purpose of the RC. If it is fully supported and the RTM is expected later is it equivalent to releasing an RTM version in February with a SP1 on a later date?
Hello,
I have my MSDN Subscription expiring on 3/23/2010. Does this mean I am very likely to miss my chance to get RTM version download? This would be very unfortunate for me. I would expect that since this was a publicly anounced release date of 3/22/2010, that I should still be able to get it when it's completed. Otherwise I am OK with your decision to finish the product. Thank you.
No, we aren't giving guidance on the RTM date at this point. I suspect once we get some feedback from the RC and confirm that we've addressed the most pressing issues we'll be a bit more forthcoming about that.
A couple of thoughts on the RC:
1) It's not "fully" supported. CSS will support it but hour are reduced and hot fixes will be limited to "blocking" issues only.
2) If we declared it "RTM" we'd have to support it for the standard MS lifecycle ~10 years if I remember correctly. As an RC, we will only support it until after RTM becomes available and then customers will have to upgrade.
3) We are still setting the expectation with customers that this is pre-release software. As such, don't be surprised if you find some bugs - we want to know about them so we can fix them. That said, I expect it to be pretty stable.
I don't believe in the theory of "ship it and we'll fix it in the first service pack". We shouldn't ship anything until we really believe it's ready for widespread, successful use. Service packs should be used to address things that we didn't know about when we shipped it, not things that we already knew about but decided to wait on.
I don't know how that's being handled. I'll forward your question to someone who probably can.
Just to be clear, and I know I'm splitting hairs a bit but these hairs are pretty important - we never announced an RTM date before. We announced a launch date. The launch is a marketing event and is usually timed around product availability but rarely do they happen at exactly the same time.
I am for the RC release and delaying the RTM until it is stable, we are using VS.NET 8 hours every day, and we will be using VS2010 for at least 2 or 3 years 8 hours a day as well.
I use to love .NET and VS until 2005, then everything just became slow regardless of the machine you have :-(
2008 improved a bit, and I hope 2010 is not a step backwards in performance :-)
For the MSDN post above, I have an MSDN subscription as well, and when it expires I do renew it, I believe VS is licensed as long as the MSDN subscription is valid :-)
Now that I'm guessing you guys have a very solid handle on customer VS perf scenarios, I'd love to see a blog post on the relative perf gains from various hardware changes for a typical developer box.
- going from 1G to 2G
- going from 2G to 4G
- going from HDD to SSD
- etc
Sure, it's hard to generalize and you'll have to mention various caveats, but it'd be nice to have some rough guidance on this.
As my personal data point, when I swapped out my laptop's 7200rpm SATA HDD for an Intel X-25M SSD, the perf difference in VS (and Win7 overall) was *huge* (machine already had 4GB of RAM), and ever since I've recommended SSD as the first hardware improvement for developers. Admittedly, this is starting with a laptop's HDD which has to balance power/heat in a way that desktops/workstations typically don't, but hence why I'd rather see MS doing this as a matrix with the VS 2010 RC build. :)