bharry's WebLog

It's really hard to bang beta bits.  With no golive license shops aren't willing to take the chance of porting.  This means the depth at which things are tested is pretty shallow.

Couple that with the predominate LINQ focus of Orcas people are probably just touching really academic examples of LINQ.  Without the full LINQ story (visual diagramming, etc.) most of us aren't willing to use it for production code.

I don't think anyone in their right might would switch their production TFS to a beta version.  So, in the same respect, if people are using the Orcas beta TFS bits, it's very trivially.  Given the complexity of a TFS install, this is probably rare.

Which is really a shame; because it limits the feedback to a very short period of time when MS devs are assigned to the product.

The little I've had time to play with I went out and tried the new ConnectBegin etc winsock2 based socket API. With no documentation it was a bit of a discovery process and I found that if you use it without docs you get it easily "sort of working" but not really without any error messages. I'd like to say that if it doesn't hurt performance then it'd be nicer to have the async apis such that a simple Hello World type of code wouldn't go easily into such state.

Other than that I feel the performance has increased overall which is really nice.

We are not starting work on any new products at present, so it does not give us anything of great value, as we can't risk making a new release of a current project be depended on beta software.

Also a lot of our customers still have a few computers that run Windows 2000 so we can not make use of the .Net framework V3 (or 3.5) until the last Windows 2000 computer is no more!  (It is only very recently that NT 4 has stopped being a problem.)

I don’t see the point of trying to learn how to do something today if I will not use of it for a long time, and the best books tend to be written after the full release of msdev.

Specifically on TFS:

I think you would only get very few shops that would set up a complete seperate test installation for the beta and use that, the cost is just too high. If you want community involvment, you would need to look for shops that are willing to use the beta/ctp for their production environment.

We are a very small university research team, spread geographically working on computer models that simulate stuff and use TFS. We like it a lot. In general we are very willing to test out new stuff, including betas, CTPs etc. A couple days of downtime are no catastrophe for us, so we would be an ideal candidate to run a beta of TFS on our real server.

But quite frankly, the Orcas release seems mostly targeted at large shops, there is little for groups like us. The little that is interesting for us seems to be only coming in Beta 2.

Also, the fact that there doesn't seem to be a supported path from TFS 2005->Orcas Beta 1->Orcas Beta 2->Orcas RTM prevents us from testing it.

In general I think it would be good to sort out setup/update issues very early in the cycle if you want community involvment. If some new feature doesn't work in Beta 1 that wouldn't be a catastrophe for us. But not having a supported path from beta to beta and ctp to ctp is simply a show stopper for us.

I guess one of the reasons is people are just too overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that is coming out of MS, I'm sure most people are hardly had time to work on the 2.0 stuff while we already have a 3.0 and 3.5 knocking at the doors,I'm hoping its not just me who are feeling this way. But anyway its always good to see progress :-)

In my case, there are several reasons:

- Not starting any new projects were I can use orcas

- While there is some very interesting stuff in Orcas, most of it is fairly evolutionary, not heavily revolutionary that drives new projects home (at least not for the work I do). THis also means that, with all the stuff coming out of MS at the same time, you need to chose how early to deep dive into any of it, and because of what I mention above, orcas is just not a priority.

Put it another way, orcas is what .net 3.0 should've been. Putting them so close together was a bad move, inmho.

We have an actual customer that is willing to jump on the Orcas-train as soon as possible. But since we really heavily on the P&P factories and Orcas does not support GAT/GAX, we can't really switch yet. Even worse, installing beta 1 on a VS2005 station, causes the latter to stop working properly. Using a VPC can help, but will increase the treshold for most of our developers. Most consultants simply don't have enough time left to experiment with the new Orcas stuff. As soon as it is possible to continue development as is, but with Orcas instead of VS2005, many people will be willing to switch, even if they have to workaround some bugs now and then.

Brian,

Matt Mitrik has all the details. We’ve completed our installation of TFS Orcas Beta 1 and Team Build and it really went flawlessly! I’ve connected from a Whidbey Team Explorer client with no issues in both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003. All in all, a very quick, simple and clean install experience!

Jeff

Well Brian, i just installed Beta 1 yesterday, because we are developing 3 new products with the .Net 3.5 technologies but i'm having a problem. When i try to load a xaml file, Cider just hangs and VS stop responding. I'm searching a solution for this. If you know something just let me know. I can't wait to start using the new version. I have a Vista Business, Thx!

You know what would really make it easier to test the new VS would be to allow it to work in a way that projects can be worked on in both VS2005 and VS orcas. Having my whole team change over to Orcas is not something that can happen, and I surly don't have the time to play with orcas since free time is not on the agenda. If I could have orcas, while the rest of my team had VS 2005, this would make it much easier to play with.

Brian,

You definitely need to consider to release some Virtual Labs with Orcas Beta 1 bits with meaningful samples on MSDN. From my point of view this is the simplest way to involve people in feedback process. No need to download & install anything, no chances to break working stuff on local site.

I really would like to play with Orcas Beta 1 bits, but it takes too much time and can't do that on my workstation directly.

At our site we're mostly constrained by time.  We'd love to bang on the new Team Build functionality, but we don't have the bandwidth to do so in a separate environment while we continue on with feature work.  A 2005 -> Orcas TFS data migration tool is sorely needed, and frankly, I'd be much more interested in testing a new version of Team Explorer for VS2005 that can interact with Orcas TFS.  

on XP the tooltips look really bed (with shadow hiding text...)

the xaml designer crashes all the time

First is time. There's just not enough of it right now. Secondly, being in the middle of a project at the moment, I can't afford to just change over and run the risk of tapping into FW3.5 when I don't mean to. Would make the client very unhappy.

An Orcas VM might make it easier, but I don't have the HD space to add yet another VM.

I would love to spend more time with the Orcas, but it's not much fun without ReSharper support for the new features.

Could you please provide more support to JetBrains? Or just buy them and let them build a new IDE :).

I really wish my job description was "play around with cool new tools that will hopefully make us more productive".  Unfortunately, I have to spend my time on our product, not yours.  After a year of cajoling, I finally got our dev team up on VSTS last week, and I expect it will be at least another year of "spare time" work by me to get the entire shop using it.

I expect this is the case for most small shops, which means our perspective isn't as visible to you guys, so fewer of our scenarios get work from you.  This ultimately makes Orcas a less-compelling upgrade for us when it is released.  Vicious cycle.

Time and money. The company is only really just getting round to thinking about .net 2. There is a dim possibility that 2 could be skipped and .net 3 chosen instead but going to 3.5 is out of the question.

From a business point of view where money and time are tight, constant and rapid change are not a good thing. It doesn't seem that long that .net 2 came out and if you apps work and do a good job, the incentive to change or upgrade is reduced. Of course new ways of thinking, designing and building apps may add more agility but there is obviously a cost.

Kay and Russ sum it up nicely. Too much new stuff going on in the dev world in general and not being able to share projects between VS2005 and Orcas means I can't work on our existing products. Will have to wait for a new product or maybe a community project.

Perhaps MS could encourage beta testers to collaborate on a new community project based on Orcas. MS could suggest some ideas, provide a CodePlex-style public Orcas TFS server, and a nice way for Orcas beta testers to meet and get involved.

Also, I have the Orcas VPC setup at home but not work so the ideas of things to try are forgotten by time I knock off. Really need a 3rd or 4th monitor at work to run everything I need. ;)

very excited about wpf, but so far have only found one downloadable demo. like everyone else I am time crunched.

I will second the comments of dionysos1973..no GAT/GAX makes it difficult for us to even test, since we are using the WCSF and Service Factory for most of our new development.

Normally, I install these things at home in a virtual machine to experiment with, but I ran out of space on my old external drive.  Bought two huge new external drives and an eSATA RAID ExpressCard, but either it is dead or the drivers for Vista don't work.  I look forward to beating up Orcas, though, especially when we see GAT/GAX support.

My focus is specifically on TFS (I work on the Scrum methodology add-in for TFS, http://scrumforteamsystem.com).  Despite the cool new stuff around MSBuild, Team Build and CI, we cannot start work on create new releases of our add-in until we are confident the features won't change.  Specifically our hands are tied until we get:

- WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 support (so we can redo our site template in the new format)

- Migration tool from 2005 to Orcas (that retains work item linkages and changeset associations).

- Web Access (what's the story around deployment of custom controls and things that you can do in the Team Explorer UI today such as Add Related Work Item)

I'm pleased to see the OM hasn't substantially changed in its usage (despite the need to recompile with new references) but I'm also waiting to see what the "upgrade" process is like (especially as our add-in installs on the server and relies on the v8.0.0.0 binaries being available in the GAC).  This means that an "upgrade" has the potential to break the existing add-ins.

So in summary, we're waiting for features.  Orcas TFS Beta 1 feels like TFS v1.0 SP2 at the moment.  We can't wait to see some output from the Beta 2 trunk (what's the current story with CTP's?)

I've had a little time to work with Orcas and I'm trying to find ways of integrating the testing Orcas and its new features with our other developers.  I've ran into two snags, but other than the two issues, I like what I see.  The two snags I ran into deal with the Ajax Extensions included in the 3.5 Framework and the Team Foundation Server support.

Specifically though, the JavaScript enhancements, the Silverlight integration and the web designer features are the ones I have found most useful so far.

The long winded version of my comments can be found on my Live Spaces page at http://dboster.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!43517E912A3A213A!129.entry.

Brian's asking folks about their reaction to Team System "Orcas" Beta1 : We released Orcas Beta 1 a few

1) Is it well known where this feedback should be given?  I downloaded Orcas and have it installed but I dont know where I should go when I see something wrong.  Are there forums or something we should be using?

2) In the WPF deisigner when you double click a button (or any control) it doesnt wire up the default event auto-magically.. this floored me that it didnt do this... are people really expected to wire up the WPF events by hand?  Plus there is no event toggle on the properties window... that stuff is IDE 101 must haves...

Orcas Beta 1 has a very VS 2005 look to it.  I think that the skin can use updating to look more Vista'ish  Is the look going to change as we get to RTM?  

I am most interested in WPF support.  

The intellisense in the XAML is improved over the Orcas CTP but can still use improvement.  The XAML editing experience is very important.  Blend has a good designer experience but poor XAML editing.  You cannot even change the size of the font.

The properties window is basic looking and does not show events.  I hope that the look improves.  It will help usability.  Blend does a nice job here.

There needs to be an automated way to assign event handlers from the designer.  (Double click on a control?)

Brian, do you really have to ask the question in such sarcastic way like that??

Maybe the buggy installer is the answer to you’re question.

Hi Brian,

I wish I had more time to test TFS Orcas Beta 1.

But that's not the only reason, I haven't even been able to get management to consider using TFS for our "small team" of developers.  Why? Cost is the first thing... for a team of 3 devs + QA and tech support staff (about 3 of them).

Next, there's so much stuff comming out of MS these past 2 years, as soon as there's one new product, there's another, and another a month later, and another... we can't keep up.  We're still developing solutions for clients that (like many other devs) still use Win2000 so we are still constrained and can't use new features for every OS.  While we are ensuring our apps don't break in Win2000 we can't be beta testing your betas.

It would also be really helpful if we could use Orcas Beta 1 side by side with VS2005 while maintaining compatibility between the project files so it can be easy to switch back from Orcas to VS2005 if something breaks.

We provide beta software to some clients and as soon as the database schema changes and they can't switch "rapidly" the adoption rate falls rapidly.

Our clients are willing to test as long as they have a safety net.

If your pricing was dropped, maybe more small shops would be willing to use your product but as it is now the pricing limits the use of TFS by large teams that are even more constrained by "time".

Hope this helps!

DM

I can only speak for myself and we will definitely start playing around with Beta1 as soon as time permits. Abit to much to deal with at the moment and since most of the mucking about with betas has to be done on spare time (=non working hours) the time to do it is kind off limited.

But rest assured well give you some feedback :) Orcas looks really nice from what I've seen so far and we will dig into all the problem areas we have experiencing with version 1 of TFS.

/Peter

I'll strongly support any effort to push the GAT/GAX release into the Orcas realm. We are currently using SCSF bits and need the GAT on Orcas ASAP. :-)

Well, we require Oracle support for all database access, so Linq is a no-go. And installing and testing TFS is a huge undertaking; we won't get funding for that big a project now... :(

One question though; Is it possible to schedule a build and "force" it to run, even if no changes has been made in the Oracas Build Scheduler? This is a vital requirement for us.

We have one project we're just starting and we're going forward with Orcas Beta 1. I'm really looking forward to some updated bits and documentation, specifically in the WorkflowServices area.

Today I got new hardware to install Orcas TFS, and so far, it looks great. I pointed Teamplain to it and it worked perfectly (apparently).

The big thing for us are the C# 3.0 features. Lambdas are making our code much, much more concise and easier to write. Implicit typing is also fantastic. LINQ to SQL looks like it'll save us a lot of SQL work, and LINQ in general transforms how we write a lot of code (for instance, writing an XML serializer for a dictionary with 3 statements...).

Real coding for us starts this week, so I'll probably be on Connect a lot soon... :)

noocyte, we have added the option for beta 2 to force the scheduled build to run, even if there have been no changes.  We had heard this request from several users and decided to provide that option based on feedback.  I'll be writing a post on it.

Buck

I'm actually writing production code with it. I love the LINQ! One thing I was bummed about was the bug in ADO.Net Entity Objects. I managed to work around it by doing some googling and finding the commmand tools work, but that was where you probably lost a few people. Also, the designer locks up on complex pages sometimes. And that split view really shouldn't be default, it's really annoying (yes i know there's a way in options to use markup or designer as default). But overall I'm very impressed with Orcas. It even seems to compile faster.

Scott Lloyd

Lloyd Software Development

Hi,

We have been evaluating Orcas in the earlier CTPs and the stuff that we reported has not been fixed in Beta 1, we are actually waiting for Beta 2! That is why we have reported no bugs or suggestions for Beta 1.

The quality of Orcas Beta 1 is much better than Whidbey Beta 1. It is much more stable and is working just fine (for a beta product anyway).

Klaus Enevoldsen

Actually, the bugs we reported are mainly in the code generator for LINQ To SQL and the support team told me that the generator will be replaced in Beta 2 and that they have been working on it for quite a while. I suspect any upcoming CTPs will have the new generator. No worries. :-)

Attempting to run OrcasBeta2_VSTS and I am getting an error:

The parent virtual hard disk has been deleted or has been moved from its previous location. Please select the new location of the parent virtual hard disk.

C:\vpc\Base01.vhd *

*this is what it is looking for

Incase anyone else is trying to solve the problem Victor had with c:\vpc\base01.vhd

To install, follow these instructions in the exact order shown

Download and install Virtual PC 2007 (recommended), Virtual PC 2004 SP1, or Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1.

Download the Base image (one-time only): Save the self-extracting base image VSCTPBase.exe and extract to a folder on your computer.

Click the Download button on this page to download all parts of the Visual Studio Code Name Orcas Beta 2. The first part is a self-extracting EXE and will prompt for the other parts.

Click on OrcasBeta2_VSTS_7PartsTotal.part01.exe to extract two files (OrcasBeta2VSTS.vmc and OrcasBeta2VSTS.vhd) to the same folder as the base. You will need to read and accept the EULA before extraction proceeds.

Launch the Virtual PC Console using Start|Programs|Microsoft Virtual PC.

Click the New button to launch the “New Virtual Machine Wizard”.

Navigate to the Options page and select "Add An existing Virtual Machine" radio button.

Click the Browse button and navigate to the location you extracted the files to and select OrcasBeta2VSTS.vmc image.

You will be prompted for the location of the base image and you should point to the Base01.vhd that you extracted earlier and click OK.

Clear the “When I finish, open settings” checkbox and click OK.

Select the new image entry, OrcasBeta2VSTS, and click Start.

To logon to the machine, click on Action Menu (Shortcut: Right Alt+Del) on the VPC console and use the credentials above.