November 19th, 2009

Beta 2 Survey Results

Brian Harry
Corporate Vice President

A couple of weeks ago I asked you all for feedback on Beta 2 and pointed you at a survey.  I think, all of you that contacted me directly have been contacted by someone to investigate the issues you reported.  If not, let me know and I’ll get it fixed.  We’ve spent the last week or so assessing the survey results. One thing that has become clear is that you all really like the release/feature set.  There has been a ton of very positive feedback about the new testing features, architecture tools, Intellitrace, Sharepoint tooling, etc.  We’re seeing more people choose to go live on this Beta 2 release than we’ve ever seen before – people just can’t wait to take advantage of the great new features. At the same time, we heard that while the performance has improved dramatically since Beta 1, 30% of you are either very dissatisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with VS 2010 Beta 2 performance.  We’ve received a lot of details on what people are unhappy with and most of them revolve around a few areas – typing/intellisense, project load, debugger, some C++ project issues, etc. 30% unhappy customers is clearly extremely unacceptable.  We have redoubled our effort on performance and are investigating every customer report.  We are looking at VM usage, working set and revisiting our performance tests to make them more reflective of “real-world” customer scenarios.  We’ve made some really big improvements, for example, I saw a 40% Intellisense throughput improvement recently and yesterday we found more than 100MB we could cut out of TFS Basic memory usage.  We’re continuing to look hard and finding significant improvements. We have changed some end game plans to make some builds available to customers who have reported issues so that we can validate that we have fixed them.  We have also decided to create an RC release that we will make available to people who would like to help validate that the performance issues have been addressed. I want to thank you all for taking the survey and sharing your opinion.  I also want to make sure you know that we’ve heard your feedback and are working aggressively to address it.  We look forward to any additional feedback you have – either on the Beta 2 build or on one of the subsequent builds we will make available.  Stay tuned for information on further build availability. Thanks,

Brian

Author

Brian Harry
Corporate Vice President

Corporate Vice President for Cloud Developer Services.

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