bharry's WebLog

A TFS 2010 Upgrade success story

Today, I saw a nice report from one of our MVPs about their experience updating their production TFS server to the TFS 2010 RC: http://geekswithblogs.net/hinshelm/archive/2010/02/10/upgrading-from-tfs-2010-beta-2-to-tfs-2010-rc.aspx

I wanted to share it for a couple of reasons.

First, it's nice to see that they've been successful and he documents his process and give some advice.

Second, he make a comment about Hyper-V snapshots I wanted to talk about.  A few months ago, it came to my attention that Microsoft won't support many scenarios where you've restored a system (particularly a server) to a saved snapshot.  The context in which it crossed my consciousness was that SQL Server is not supported (and therefore TFS).  At first blush I was shocked and immediately started to look into it.

What I discovered is that the real issue is taking a snapshot of a running system - not of a shutdown system.  When a snapshot is taken of a running system, it is taken exactly as is: network connections open, interrupt requests in progress, everything.  Of course, restoring a snapshot doesn't restore anything outside the context of the current machine (other servers you are connected to like attached databases, mirrors, web services, etc).  It also can't restore the hardware back to its precise state.

As such when a snapshot is restored, it's a bit like getting abruptly awakened from a deep sleep.  The system has to try to make sense of how it's internal state relates to the external state.  The OS has been hardened to handle this pretty well but many, dare I say most, applications do not.  And quite honestly, I'm not sure they every will because for many applications it is impractical or impossible.

So my VERY STRONG advice to you is shut down your Hyper-V server before you take a snapshot if you hope to ever restore it.  It might work 500 times for you and then on the 501st time boom - your snapshot of a running system won't restore to a consistent state and you are hosed.

Brian

Support for the 2010 RC

Like Beta 2, the RC is a  supported, "go live" release, able to be used in a production environment.  If you already acquired your support ID for Beta 2, it will continue to work for the RC.  If you haven't gotten it yet, here's how you can: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/10/26/support-for-vs-2010-beta-2.aspx

Brian

Upgrading to the TFS 2010 RC

Bryan Krieger has put together a very thorough document on upgrading to the RC: http://blogs.msdn.com/bkrieger/archive/2010/02/03/tfs-2010-beta2-to-rc-upgrade-guide.aspx

It's kind of long because it covers almost every form of upgrade you might consider.  For most people, upgrading will be uninstall Beta 2, install RC and run the "Upgrade from Previous Version" wizard.  If you have build controllers/agents, you'll need to uninstall and reinstall them as well.  There's tons of good detail in the doc that should answer just about every question you might have.

It also covers bugs that we know about in the RC.  The most painful of which is probably the fact that the RC Proxy doesn't work.  There was a late change to some setup logic that caused the proxy to break and by the time we discovered it, it was too late to fix it for the RC.  You can continue to use the Beta 2 proxy if you need one.  Of course, the proxy will be fixed again for RTM.  There are a few other bugs documented in Bryan's document.

Let me or Bryan know if you have any questions.

Brian

VS 2010/.NET 4 Release Candidate is Available for MSDN subscribers

This afternoon we published the 2010 release candidate for MSDN subscribers.  You can download it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx.  While the release candidate doesn't include every SKU, it includes most everything you might want to look at, including: VS (Pro, Premium and Ultimate), .NET 4 (Client and Full), TFS, Team Explorer, VS SDK and more.

It should be available to everyone by Wednesday - it takes a little longer to propagate to the Microsoft public download site.

Once you've used it for a while, we'd really appreciate your feedback on our RC survey.

And, of course, you can file any issues you find on the VS Connect site.

We've put a ton of work into the Release Candidate.  We've been working hard since Beta 2 on both stability and performance.  I've been using the RC build on my netbook for the last week or so and I have to say it really seems to be looking good.  It's still not quite done yet.  We're still fixing bugs and addressing a last few performance issues but if all the SLCTP feedback we've gotten is any indicator, then I really believe most of you will be very happy with it.

In the vein of not quite finished yet, we did find one pretty nasty crashing bug after we signed off on the RC.  It happens with multi-touch devices and some screen readers.  We're working on a patch for those of you who need it.  I'll let you know when it is available.  In the last week I've been using it on my netbook, I haven't had a single crash and I think I've only shut it down once.

Good luck and please let us know what you think!

Brian

Secure Development Lifecycle Process Templates

We’ve been working with the Secure Development Lifecycle team and Microsoft for quite a while now and they’ve done some excellent work to educate customers on how to build secure applications.  They’ve provided some great guidance and tools and made much of it available in a form that works well for Team System customers.

They’ve recently made a series of announcements about their latest round of investments.  They’ve announced the availability of a Beta of a new SDL process template based on the TFS 2008 MSF Agile process template.  This enables customers doing Agile development with TFS to also be able to take advantage of the great SDL practices and integrate it directly into the way they work today.

They also announced that they will be making a TFS 2010 version of the same template available shortly after TFS 2010 releases.

These templates go well beyond just a few new work item fields, reports, etc.  They integrate security tools and processes directly into your workflow.  For example:

• One of the core principles of SDL is that security activities need to take place at every point in the product’s development lifecycle. It would make no sense for MSF-A+SDL projects to contain only a finite list of SDL work items that the team could complete over their first few iterations and then never have to do security work again. If a project lasts for 100 iterations or more, secure development practices should be followed in each and every one of those iterations. To support this requirement, MSF-A+SDL team projects will automatically generate the appropriate new security work items every time a new iteration is added to the project.
• Check-in policies that will verify that code being checked into the project’s source control repository are compliant with SDL development requirements.  These policies can find instances of banned APIs that can lead to privilege escalation vulnerabilities, improperly set compiler or linker options that could increase the potential damage of a successful attack, and other dangerous mistakes.
• The Bug work item has been modified to include Security Cause, Effect, and Origin tracking fields that integrate automatically with the other free tools that the SDL team has already released: the SDL Threat Modeling Tool, the Binscope Binary Analyzer, and the Minifuzz File Fuzzer. Additional reports and filters have been added to the template so that you can easily see which of your security tools are giving you the biggest bang for your buck.
• MSF-A+SDL team projects will also automatically generate new security work items whenever new Visual Studio projects or web sites are checked into the project’s source control repository. These work items will be appropriate to the type of project checked in; for example, adding a C++ Windows library will generate different work items than adding a C# web application will.

Brian

New 2010 Guidance from the Rangers

The Visual Studio ALM Rangers, have been busy at work putting together some great guidance for helping customers get ready to put the 2010 release into production.  If you’d like to learn more about getting going with our 2010 release, check these out…

• Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance: consists of compact cheat sheets for Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 and Visual Studio (VS) 2010, addressing the core problem of teams in the field who are unaware of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server capabilities or have little time to invest in detailed education.
• Visual Studio 2010 TFS Upgrade Guide:  covers scenarios which may be encountered during and after the upgrade process. It provides examples of most common and potential issues. It covers scenarios related to general Upgrade Process, Work Item Templates, Reports, and Enterprise TFS Management (ETM).
• Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching Guide 2010: Branching and merging of software is a very large topic. It is an area where there is a lot of maturity in the software industry. This Ranger solution focuses on applied and practical examples of branching that you can use right now. The 2010 release includes discussions around branching concepts and strategies but also focuses on practical hands-on labs.
• Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Requirements Management Guidance: Requirements Engineering (RE) using Team Foundation Server. We provide formalized Microsoft field experience in the form of recommended procedures and processes, Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server configurations, and skill development references for the Requirements Engineering discipline of your application lifecycle.
• Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 VM Factory: prescriptive guidance around the virtualization of the Visual Studio 2010 and guidance for full automation of the creation of virtual machines. We help users with the installation and configuration of virtualized environments with least effort and maximum automation.

Brian

New MSBuild Sidekicks available

The Sidekicks have been invaluable add-ons to Visual Studio for years.  Attrice just released an update to the MSBuild add-ons.  Read more about it here: http://www.attrice.info/blog/2010/01/27/msbuild-sidekick-v3-beta-is-available/

Brian

Playing back the help feedback

This has been a really good conversation.  I've also gotten some excellent off line emails articulating the issues.  As I have been reading the feedback, noodling over it and discussing it with the help team, I've come the the following summary conclusion:

We set out to create an improved help platform that is open, standards based and extensible.  The primary benefits we were after were a good online experience, a very customizable off line experience without redundant content authoring, the ability for others to contribute to the offline content, a simple default UI and a customizable presentation experience (the new help SDK makes it easy to build alternate help clients).  In doing so, we took a step backwards on some valuable help features.  Over time, we will add back many of those features and refine the help system to provide an even more seamless help experience.  The difference is that it will be built on this open and extensible platform that enables innovations not possible before.

I do believe we talked to a lot of customers about the experience we were building but I also believe that what I'll call the "power help user" may have been under-represented.  Much of the feedback has helped me understand the kind of experience that the power help user is looking for.  I believe the help team has internalized much of the feedback and has ideas on how to continue to improve the experience.

There were a number of questions/comments on my last post on help that I think were misconceptions about the new help system (in part based on behvior of the last).

1) The new help system is asynchronous.  Your IDE does not lock up while help is launching.  Also, it's generally pretty fast, by the way, so even if it weren't asynchronous, most of the time you wouldn't notice.

2) It does support offline.  I realize the natural assumption of using a browser to host the content is that it is accessing the internet.  While it can, it can also serve the content from the local machine.

3) I think I really get now why some of you are so wed to the index, I can see how it can be very helpful.

4) I totally agree that relying exclusively on the browser for the window management probably isn't going to be a great experience and we will need to provide an alternate one.

I'm not going to respond to each and every comment/question (there were quite a few), but I'm grateful for the feedback and if you think I've missed something important or misinterpreted something, please let me know.

Thanks,

Brian

CodePlex now supports Mercurial

If you haven’t seen it, here’s the announcement:

http://blogs.msdn.com/codeplex/archive/2010/01/22/codeplex-now-supporting-native-mercurial.aspx

As you may know, CodePlex provides a hosted community development environment and has been built on TFS (you can connect to it from VS like any other TFS server).  They’ve just recently announced support for Mercurial for version control and I’ve already seen several threads of the form “Does this mean Microsoft is abandoning TFS?”

If you read my blog, then you know I’m responsible for TFS.  You may be interested to know that I was involved in making the decision to add Mercurial support to CodePlex.  It does not, in any way, signal a move away from TFS or a lack of confidence in TFS.  TFS is the core of Microsoft’s ALM solution and it will continue to be for as far as I can see into the future.

So why would we do this?  Well, the biggest reason is demand for distributed version control for open source projects.  By there very nature, open source projects lend themselves to distributed version control.  I think many scenarios can benefit from it but open source really needs it based on the submission model that is often used.  TFS doesn’t support distributed version control today, it makes sense for CodePlex so we chose to add Mercurial.

I fully expect that we will be adding distributed version control to TFS.  In fact, in the next few months, I expect to kick off a prototyping effort to experiment with this.  I’m not sure yet what our productization plan will be but I want to get started understanding the experience we want to create and the effort to do it.

So what about the “message” that this sends?  I hope it sends the message that we listen to customers and we believe in choice.  CodePlex still supports TFS and customers can choose which they want.  The challenge I’ll be giving to my team is that I want most customers choosing TFS – even for open source development projects.  We’re going to do that by making TFS a more desirable experience than Mercurial (or any other system available).  Given open source is not the sweet spot of what we do today, don’t expect that to happen over night.  It will be one of the stars that we chart our course by but we will continue to ensure that TFS is the best solution on the market for teams that need the power of a full, integrated ALM suite that addresses the needs of the diverse participants in the software development processes: Developers, Testers, Architects, Project managers, Business analysts, Business stake holders, IT management, Operations staff and more.

Brian

Help with Help

Over the past few couple of months, I’ve seen some negative community feedback on the new help system – not universally, but enough that it’s been concerning me.  The truth is, though, I’ve been so busy with the performance work that other than pinging the help team every once in a while to make sure they were hearing the feedback, I really haven’t had time to understand it.

When I was in Redmond this week, I finally got a couple of hours to sit down with the help team and the new TFSServerManager app I’m building and play with it.  I can now say that I really don’t understand the intensity of some of the feedback.  I’m hoping some of you can help me.

Before I launch into my perspective, let me give you some context.  When I spent the vast majority of every day typing code, I used help quite a lot (most of it was pre-IntelliSense days, so I really used it a lot).  At that time, my primary mode of using help was the keyword index.  Search sucked and the keyword index was by far the fastest way to find what you were looking for.  In more recent years I find IntelliSense has dramatically reduced (but not eliminated) my reliance on help.  Although, I must say, as an aside, that in 2010, my reliance on help is dwindling even further because it now finds members that match by arbitrary substring.  Anyway, in the last few years, MSDN has been my help system – yes it doesn’t work when you are offline, but I find I don’t do all that much offline programming and I get by without it.  So, the truth is, I haven’t used (or even installed) VS help in several years now.

So, please take that as context for all of my comments here.  Your experience is probably very different and that’s what I’m hoping to learn from.

So, I sat down to try out the new help system.  I wanted to try both online and offline help.  Installing local help was really easy, I just ran the help manager from the Visual Studio Start menu folder, picked the subset of help I wanted locally.  It then proceeded to download the help in the background.  In the mean time I played with online help.  When the download was done, I played with local help.

The first time I launched help, it was really slow.  After that, I had occasional occurrences of slowness but not often and by and large help was WAY faster than using MSDN.  The help system did a reasonable job finding the help topic I was looking for but definitely had some issues (see my list of issues below) and all, in all I found the experience to be quite reasonable and better (except in a couple of ways) than using MSDN directly.  I think with a few improvements that the help team committed to making before we ship, I’m a convert to the new help system and will use it instead of MSDN directly.

Not everything was rosy and I don’t know that I can remember every issue I hit (the help team was watching me and taking notes, so I know they got them all but I just have my memory right now on the airplane :)).  Here’s the notable things I remember.  I’ve put them in decreasing order of importance (in my book)…

1. I saw several issues in the F1 resolution rules (like mis-capitalizing something), causing what I’m looking for to not be found.  I think most of the rules issues I found could be hugely mitigated by falling back to a full text search result when you can’t resolve the keyword rather than going to an empty “blah not found” page.  The help team has committed to doing this for RTM.
2. Opening a new browser tab every time I hit F1 leads to painful tab management.  I don’t like getting browsers full of dozens of tabs.  They pointed out to me that I can change my browser settings and have it reuse the existing tab for everything, but that’s a global setting, and the truth is, I’m happy with the behavior I get for most everything but help – so I really don’t think I want to do that.  I’m not sure what they can do about this without writing specific code for each browser to get the behavior that I want.
3. The clipping of many topics in the left pane (table of contents) with no resizeability is pretty ugly.  You could hover over a topic and see a tool tip with the full string, but the clipping of topics seemed very unfortunate and inhibited browsing.  I’d like to see the table of contents resizable horizontally so I can browse topics with longer names – maybe even a horizontal scroll bar but I can’t say for sure that would be an improvement without trying it.
4. The inability to scroll the left (table of contents) and right (topic content) separately in light weight mode is kind  of a big deal.  It makes it much harder to maintain context and navigate around.  I think they are going to address this.
5. The lack of a keyword index is unfortunate but not damning.  I’ve seen a lot of feedback on this particular point in the community and I can’t understand the intensity.  I don’t think the lack of it slowed me down, though I agree it would be a nice feature (and the help team has heard that feedback and is busy working on a post RTM add-on to provide it).
6. The table of contents tree behavior in lightweight is less than ideal but usable.  To make the lightweight help pages render MUCH faster, they’ve greatly simplified the management of the table of contents tree.  The result is that it’s faster to get to a topic but it’s harder to see context around it and to quickly browse around because you can’t see the whole tree and us + and – to expand/collapse.  I found myself hitting the browser “back” button quite a lot.  I didn’t hate it but I can see how for some scenarios it’s not what you want.  To be honest, I still can’t decide whether I like the “lightweight” or the “classic” views better.  There are different trade-offs.
7. Launch speed is sometimes a bit slow.  As I remarked above, this was particularly true of the first time.  I went back to try and repro it a little while ago and I couldn’t so I’m not sure it’s a big issue.

So, that’s my brain dump on things that could be better about the new help system.  The new help system has a lot of benefits and a number of areas for improvement but my assessment is that, overall, it’s pretty good.  I’ve seen feedback from some people who I think would describe the new help system as very bad but I don’t really understand it.  Can someone help me?

One thing I will say is that I’ve been looped in on a few thread/forum posts between members of the help team and some people in the community with feedback and I don’t think we’ve always handled the feedback very well.  I saw one thread this week where I would say we were down right condescending.  I’ve given very strong feedback to the management of the help team about that and I think they are taking steps to deal better with the feedback and ensure we are listening, keeping an open mind and doing everything we can to address concerns.

Brian

State of VS 2010 Performance

Up until Christmas, I was blogging almost every day about the progress we’ve made on addressing the Beta 2 feedback that VS 2010 had significant performance issues.  Since then, our efforts have hardly taken a break.  I saw active investigations all the way up to Christmas eve and then a bit of a lull until Jan 4th when activity resumed in full force.

The improvements are so many and so dramatic that I really couldn’t enumerate them all here.  I think the best way to summarize it is to talk about the feedback we are getting from people as they use new builds.  Since our renewed performance effort started, we have produced 3 Super Limited Community Technology Preview releases (SLCTPs – yeah, a mouth full :)).  These have been delivered to virtually anyone who has expressed performance dissatisfaction, and for whom we could find contact information.  With each one we contact as many recipients as we can and solicit feedback on the changes.

About a week ago, we delivered SLCTP3.  A few hundred people (outside Microsoft) have received it and so far we have close to a hundred survey responses from them.  We also made a huge push to get everyone in Developer Division upgraded to a January build.  I think, as of late this week, we managed to get over 80% of the division upgraded.  Lastly, we’ve reached out to partner teams like Blend, Exchange, CodePlex and Oslo to upgrade and give us feedback on the new builds.  The difference between now and Beta 2 is staggering.

Before I go into the details, let me remind you of the results we got from our initial Beta 2 surveys.

Our initial external customer survey said that approximately 30% of Beta 2 testers where somewhat or very dissatisfied with Beta 2 performance (the earler version of the “Performance” chart below).  After seeing that and running an internal survey of dogfooders, we found that about 70% of internal users were somewhat or very dissatisfied with Beta 2 performance.

Now, at SLCTP3, it looks very different.  Our external LCTP3 results look like this.  And remember, all of these results are from people who complained about Beta 2 performance (not the 70% of people who didn’t).  We didn’t give any of the LCTPs to or survey people who were already happy.

And our internal dogfooder survey looks like this.  The “improved” questions are relative to Beta 2.  The Ready To Ship and Feature Satisfaction questions are absolute.  The performance feature satisfaction question was 70% somewhat or very dissatisfied after Beta 2.

As you can see, the picture looks totally different.  The very dissatisfied numbers are nearly gone and the total dissatisfied are way better.  I have no illusion that we can make everyone happy – we could work on it for 2 more years and still have a few people who would like even more but I feel like we have really turned the corner.  We aren’t done but we are now ready to go out with a broad Release Candidate and solicit feedback from thousands rather than hundreds.

Beyond the statistics, some of the verbatim customer comments tell an even more compelling story…

• The LCTP-3 build appears to resolve all of the issues I have reported pertinent to the normal VS2010 Beta 2 release: the uninstall and reinstall procedure worked without any anomalies, including full installation of the LCTP-3 version of MS Help Viewer 1.0; … I have seen no issues with LCTP-3 in the brief work it so far that suggests it is not fully ready for full production.
• The performance is acceptable now and I would consider the product generally shippable…
• Performance on SLCTP3 is ten times better than that of Beta. Previously in Beta I'd crash every 1.5 hours. Since moving to SLCTP3 I have not received any crashes to date.
• I've been running the SLCTP3 for about 3.5 hours today and its been amazing. Previously I would have crashed at least 2 times and had insane perf issues.
• It’s such a huge improvement so far from a performance perspective that I'm excited to work with it again.
• I'd say the performance is about equal or maybe slightly better in some scenarios than VS2008. Exciting compared to the not so good performance of beta 2.
• I reported performance problems with navigating the IDE (menus, windows, etc.) over RDP, and this build is a big improvement over beta 2. VS2008 still feels snappier when compared side-by-side on the same VM, but the performance doesn't bother me in this build of VS2010.
• The Silverlight designer (still working on a Silverlight 3 project) seems to load MUCH faster than with Beta 2.  It's a night and day difference.

And not to ignore any negative feedback:

• Build time is 10-15% longer for the same solution compared to 2008
• Compilation of WPF project is >500% slower on VS 2010 SLCTP 3
• Intellisense pop-ups are slow to pop up
• Was using ReSharper 5.0 but its way too slow and buggy at the moment. It makes the environment very fragile and unstable.
• When its a fresh install it feels great. However, if you have a lot of add-in's it seems to start to get a little sluggish on startup and when you perform certain actions.

We are following up on all of these with survey respondents.

We are not done with performance or functional improvements but I believe we have addressed all of the major issues and are now ready to make sure we’ve hit all of the combinatorics, edge cases, etc.  That’s what a Release Candidate will help us do.  In parallel with getting an RC ready, there are a few performance areas where we are still working diligently.  Probably the biggest one is solution build performance.  Many build scenarios are faster than VS 2008 but we’re also still tracking a number of applications where it is slower (generally between 15 and 20%).  We are also putting some finishing touches on some remaining editor/WPF painting and responsiveness issues.  I think even without them you’ll find the RC performance to be quite good but we’ll continue to polish it while we wait for RC feedback.

We’re working on getting the release candidate ready now and I’ll let you know as soon as it is available.

It’s been a hectic couple of months working through all of the feedback and resulting issues.  It’s not quite what I was expecting to be doing but that’s the way it goes.  I’ve got more fodder for posts on things we’ve learned along the way and I’ll try to get a few of them written over the next month or so.

Thanks for helping us work through this and deliver a product that you are going to love,

Brian

Finally back to blogging

Man, it’s just crazy how fast a month can go.  I was blogging furiously all December about our performance efforts and progress and then a couple of days before Christmas I went “offline” and haven’t made it back until now :(.  It has been just crazy.  Other than a few days off between Christmas and the new year, I’ve literally been involved in performance design discussions, reviews and evaluations for hours every day.

I also decided in mid December that I needed more hands-on experience with the product so that I could really tell when we had finally licked the performance gremlin.  I picked up a project I’d been lightly working on over the past 6 months (a new version of TFSServerManager for TFS 2010) and started working hard on it (several hours a day).  I’ve extended it with some web UI, some web services (to avoid direct database access), some TFS Job Service extensions and, of course, the client you know and love.  I wanted to make sure I got to use a reasonably broad set of the technologies so I could see the development experience for all of them.  In fact, most of my “time off” between Christmas and new years was actually coding on it :)

As I write this, I’m flying back to North Carolina from my latest trip to Redmond.  It was very productive.  I got to spend some quality time with my team there and also spent a bunch of time working on divisional performance issues.

I’m really happy to say that our performance work has really been coming together and I’m starting to feel really good about it.  That’s going to be the subject of my next post.

I hope you all had some relaxing time off over the holidays.  I’m glad to be back to talking to you about what we are doing to get VS 2010 ready to ship.

Brian

Praktik Hosting of Team Foundation Server

I’ve seen a lot of companies asking themselves whether they want to host their own ALM solution or pay someone else to do it.  Most are still deciding to do it for themselves but I see more people deciding to let someone else do it every year.  Being able to rely on someone else to provide a 24x7, global, reliable service is definitely appealing.

There are a number of TFS partners out there provide TFS hosting.  I’ve blogged about several before.  I wanted to introduce you to a relatively new one: Praktik Hosting.  If hosting your development process is something that interests you, it’s definitely worth checking out Praktik.

Brian

Final TFS Beta 2 Test Patch is Available

Today we are releasing the final TFS Beta 2 test patch.  This patch is for the client and has a few nice bug fixes in it.  Again, if you get the chance to try it out, please let me know if you have any issues.

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=25422

or

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB978148

Note, the code.msdn.microsoft.com link is still in the process of publishing so you may still get an error for the next few hours.

Here’s the list of bug fixes:

1. If, in the connect dialog, the URL with “/tfs” fails to connect, fails back to base URL (minus “/tfs”).
2. Removed an extraneous error that occurred when connecting to a CodePlex with the 2010 Team Explorer.
3. Fixed an error that affected connecting to TFS using HTTPS over the Internet from behind an ISA proxy that requires authentication. (This affected people connecting to CodePlex over the Internet.)
4. Improved performance when using Crtl-A to select multiple Labels.

Brian

VS 2010 & .NET 4 Public Release Candidate Planned

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