How fast can a month go?
I’ve been feeling bad about leaving my blog untended for a while. Finally this morning I went and looked and realized it’s been over a month since my last post and I haven’t written many all summer. It’s been very busy both at home and at work. We shipped VS/VSTS/TFS 2010 Beta 1 back in May. Right after that we had a DCR push (Design Change Request). Think of this as a big effort to plug all of the feature gaps, smooth all of the edges and finish any know work that was identified in the run up to shipping Beta 1 but was too late to address in Beta 1. The drive to ship the first Beta is always a very enlightening time. If you got a chance to use Beta 1 (of VS, in particular), you probably noticed that the responsiveness/performance was not where it should be. Much of the work over the past few months has been on performance testing, feature work and bug fixes. While we won’t be completely finished with performance for Beta 2, I think you will notice a marked difference. I’m using the product every day and it’s starting to feel pretty good. We pretty much finished the DCR work by the end of June and started getting some solid Beta feedback. We’ve been addressing that and fixing bugs through July and August. Just recently we have started the lock down process for Beta 2 where we gradually turn the dial to slow down bug fixing and increase stability. Beta 2 is going to be a “go-live” release for many of the components (TFS for example) and we need to make sure it’s pretty solid. It’s been a hectic time of making the hard calls on the last set of work we need to do, testing thoroughly and increasing the breadth of the configurations we’re testing. I’ve also been spending 10 or more hours a week just using the product – walking through scenarios, building apps, etc to make sure that the day-to-day experience for developers will be good. It’s also been an exciting time of really seeing the product come together. There’s a ton of really cool new stuff. We haven’t announced a Beta 2 date yet, so don’t ask me 🙂 Hopefully, I’m going to be able to get back into the rhythm of posting at least a couple of times a week. I’m really hoping to finish my series on new TFS 2010 features that I started around the Beta 1 RTM timeframe. I still have reporting, version control and build automation left to go. As always seems to happen when I take a hiatus, I’ve got a backlog of topics to blog about. Unless something happens, I expect to post several times in the next few days.
Brian
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