Some more Windows acronyms explained

One of the good reasons to keep MSDN Blogs on the list of Blogs I Read is that a lot of stuff goes past my eyes via a FeedDemon radar. :-)

Though I have to admit that Feed Demon seemed to have some kind of memory leak problem when I ran it on Server 2003 SP1, one that no longer seems to repro now that I run it on XP SP2. I am now back to avoiding reboots when not installing software. I probably should have reported it but it did not occur to me that it was the only new program I had installed before requiring reboots every few days until it was too late.

Anyway, on to what I saw earlier....

I noticed on Brian Welcker's blog, (cleverly entitled Direct Reports), a fun post entitled Brotherhood.

In this post, he explained the meaning of CTP (Community Technology Preview), and explained the meaning of IDW, while not literally defining it. He said:

While no one seems to know exactly what "IDW" stands for, it is an interim build that meets a set of criteria for release to a larger audience outside of the product testers. The frequency of IDWs depends on the team and varies from weekly IDWs to bi-monthly. While they are full interim builds of the product, until recently, IDWs rarely went outside of Microsoft, and if they did, only to a select set of customers.

I can clear up one mystery here, at least. According to Jack Mayo, IDW stands for:

Internal Developer Workstation - a build that has additional focus on it in order to make sure it meets a level of quality such that anyone at MS could use it as their main machine without too much pain.

Of course armed with knowledge (and the historical fact that in older versions of NT like NT 4.0 the more personal SKU was the "workstation" SKU), one can attempt to logically deduce the meaning of the next highest quality of internal build, the IDS build:

Internal Developer Server - a build that has additional focus on it in order to make sure it meets a level of quality such that someone at MS could consider using it as an internal server without too much pain.

Of course the terms IDW and IDS are today used in a much wider sense than the prior Windows workstation/server context (and probably were even back then), but the quality bars themselves make sense for people who are not developing or testing the product daily, but who have either reason to periodically install the product or who just wish to do a little dogfooding.

Now while it seems that both SQL Server and the .NET Framework have embraced the idea of getting builds out more often based on a more arbitrary, time-based model, Windows seems to be using more of an "event based" model. For example, we just released a "WinHEC" build of Longhorn to attendees of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference and have in the past sometimes done the same thing for the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) and at other events.

I myself currently have all of the following installed:

• The February CTP of SQL Server (a.k.a. IDW 13) on two machines
• The April CTP of SQL Server (a.k.a. IDW 14) on one machine
• The Beta 2 build of Whidbey on one machine
• Four different daily debug and release builds of Whidbey built on my own machines over the last two weeks or so
• At least nine daily x86 and x64 builds of Longhorn across different partitions of four machines (though one them is entirely broken and three of them are very old and if I ever boot into them again it will only be to upgrade)

Notice how I use IDW builds for the products I don't do development on and whatever seems to build on the ones I do? I only trust daily builds if I'm building them or know the people who are personally. :-)