{"id":5131,"date":"2010-06-07T06:01:26","date_gmt":"2010-06-07T06:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/bharry\/2010\/06\/07\/what-on-earth-is-a-feature-pack\/"},"modified":"2018-08-14T00:20:19","modified_gmt":"2018-08-14T00:20:19","slug":"what-on-earth-is-a-feature-pack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/what-on-earth-is-a-feature-pack\/","title":{"rendered":"What on Earth is a Feature Pack?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&rsquo;ve been following my blog for a while, then you&rsquo;ve heard about these things we call &ldquo;Power Tools&rdquo;.&nbsp; You might have even tried them out and found out they could be darned useful \ud83d\ude42&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll if you&rsquo;ve been following my blog long enough, you&rsquo;ll know that at one point they were called Power Toys but we changed the name to Power Tools because we got a bunch of feedback that &ldquo;Toy&rdquo; was disturbing to people.&nbsp; Back in Sept 2006, I wrote a <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/bharry\/archive\/2006\/09\/04\/739645.aspx\">post<\/a> that described the Power Toy philosophy (the philosophy didn&rsquo;t change when we changed the name).&nbsp; And in November, I wrote a slightly higher level <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/bharry\/archive\/2006\/11\/30\/team-foundation-server-roadmap.aspx\">post<\/a> positioning Power Tools in the overall pantheon of release mechanisms that we have.\nPower Tools have been one of the most popular things we&rsquo;ve done.&nbsp; They&rsquo;ve been a terrific way to deliver cool value to customers quickly and relatively hassle free.&nbsp; They fill a need between product and free community content.&nbsp; They come with a promise that we&rsquo;ll stand behind them and help you if you have issues and fix bugs that you run into.&nbsp; Some of them will even ultimately get incorporated into the product eventually.\nFor the last couple of years we&rsquo;ve been feeling like there&rsquo;s another gap in our release spectrum.&nbsp; That gap is between where Power Tools are now and &ldquo;real product&rdquo;.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ve been feeling a need to have a way to release new features that essentially are part of the product but to do it without waiting for a full release or a Beta.&nbsp; We build a fair amount of stuff that is relatively stand alone and ready to deliver but because we want to treat it like &ldquo;real product&rdquo;, it has to wait for the next major release (which as you know happen about every 2 years).&nbsp; It&rsquo;s not particularly fun for us and I know customers would rather get it sooner than later.\nOur new term for this is &ldquo;Feature Pack&rdquo;.&nbsp; So what is a Feature Pack and how does it differ from other things?&nbsp; If you read one of my previous descriptions of Power Tools you&rsquo;ll find them defined along the lines of:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Carefully chosen features that provide real value<\/li>\n<li>No changes to &ldquo;shipped bits&rdquo;.<\/li>\n<li>Limited testing<\/li>\n<li>Supported through forums (only a few are actually supported by our support organization)<\/li>\n<li>Lacking many of the &ldquo;productization&rdquo; steps &ndash; localization, accessibility, serviceability, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Updates through uninstall\/reinstall<\/li>\n<li>No promise to include in future versions<\/li>\n<li>Etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Feature Packs are similar in some ways and different in others.&nbsp; As I said, they fill the gap between Power Tools and Product.\nFeature Packs are like Power Tools in the following ways:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>No changes to shipped bits &ndash; The only way we can change shipped bits is through servicing &ndash; QFEs, GDRs, Service Packs, etc.&nbsp; Feature Packs are pure add-on functionality.<\/li>\n<li>No servicing and updates through uninstall\/reinstall &ndash; We won&rsquo;t be shipping hot fixes for Feature Packs.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll deliver them on a reasonably regular cadence and fixing the reported issues in each release.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Feature Packs are more like Product in the following ways:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Even more carefully chosen features that provide real value &ndash; We&rsquo;ll go through the same prioritization process for choosing Feature Pack features that we use to choose product features.&nbsp; Our investment in Feature Packs will be higher than in Power Tools and as such it&rsquo;s even more important that we pick features with maximum value.<\/li>\n<li>Full testing &ndash; We will use our standard release testing processes.&nbsp; We will ensure to the best of our ability that Feature Packs will work seamlessly for you.<\/li>\n<li>Full support &ndash; Our Customer Support Service will fully support all Feature Packs.<\/li>\n<li>Full productization &ndash; By default we will do all of the productization work for Feature Packs &ndash; Localization, Accessibility, Docs, &hellip;&nbsp; We may, on occasion, decide to exclude some of these but that should be rare.<\/li>\n<li>Inclusion in the next major release &ndash; While I can&rsquo;t ever guarantee anything, it is our full intent that every Feature Pack will be included in the next major VS release.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As you can see Feature Packs are a lot like product.&nbsp; Essentially, think of them as a way to deliver fully complete product features off cycle from the major releases.\nOne other difference between Feature Packs and Power Tools is that Feature Packs are not &ldquo;free&rdquo;.&nbsp; I wrote a <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/bharry\/archive\/2008\/07\/05\/power-tools-and-software-assurance.aspx\">post<\/a> a couple of years ago about the role of Power Tools with respect to our various subscription options.&nbsp; Feature Packs are our first experiment in this vein.&nbsp; Only people who have current MSDN subscriptions will qualify for Feature Packs.&nbsp; As I&rsquo;ve said, Feature Packs are like &ldquo;real product&rdquo; and as such they cost money like real product.&nbsp; I know many, many of our customers already have MSDN subscriptions and for you all it is going to feel a lot like &ldquo;free&rdquo; \ud83d\ude42&nbsp; For those of you who don&rsquo;t, you should seriously consider it.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s a ton of value in MSDN and Feature Packs are just one more component of that value.\nVery soon (like later today :)) I&rsquo;ll be writing a post about or first Feature Pack.&nbsp; Keep your eyes peeled &ndash; it&rsquo;s going to be unbelievably cool!\nSo does this mean that Power Tools are a thing of the past?&nbsp; Not at all.&nbsp; Also later today, I&rsquo;m going to tell you about some awesome new Power Tools available from the VS Pro team (yep, they are joining the Power Tools bandwagon too).&nbsp; My team (TFS) is also hard at work on our next Power Tools release and I&rsquo;ll let you know what is coming in that as soon as I can.<\/p>\n<p>Brian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&rsquo;ve been following my blog for a while, then you&rsquo;ve heard about these things we call &ldquo;Power Tools&rdquo;.&nbsp; You might have even tried them out and found out they could be darned useful \ud83d\ude42&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll if you&rsquo;ve been following my blog long enough, you&rsquo;ll know that at one point they were called Power Toys [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":244,"featured_media":14617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,4],"class_list":["post-5131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-tfs","tag-visual-studio"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>If you&rsquo;ve been following my blog for a while, then you&rsquo;ve heard about these things we call &ldquo;Power Tools&rdquo;.&nbsp; You might have even tried them out and found out they could be darned useful \ud83d\ude42&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll if you&rsquo;ve been following my blog long enough, you&rsquo;ll know that at one point they were called Power Toys [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/244"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}