(Did I give it away by putting the "1" next to the CTP?)

Well put your seatbelts on baby because CTP2 is in the cooker and will be available sometime soon.  I’m writing this note to remind everyone of what a CTP is and is not.  The original CTP: Watch this Space blog is worth re-reading.  Wait, let me be more precise – go read that blog again.  Do you remember PROMISED that we’d listen and act upon (a subset of) your feedback and that that meant that things would change? 

Well we got some great feedback and have made a bunch of changes.  

I think you are going to like the changes.  That said, the new CTP is still a CTP so the same rules apply: I PROMISE that things will change (you get to tell me how they should change) so don’t bet your mortgage on anything you see.  It is also worth noting that as we switch to "SHIP MODE", quality becomes our primary focus and occasionally that means that things get cut. 

You should be aware that if/when a component gets cut, it does NOT necessarily mean that that was a buggy component.  That might be the case but more often than not, things get cut to create bandwidth to focus on the quality of other things.  E.g. the test org can only test X things and we have X+Y things on the plate.

We had a situation like this for Version 1 where we had done a bunch of work to support transactional cmdlets and providers.  We had all the code done but didn’t have a group willing to work with us to take advantage of that infrastructure so we had to cut it to create bandwidth to improve the quality of the stuff we shipped in V1.  I’ve got to tell you that this was incredibly painful for me personally as I’ve had a fire-in-the-belly to support transactions since the beginning of the project.  Can you imagine what you’d be able to do with transactional cmdlets!!! (The mind boggles!) 

I get a lot of people telling me how shocked they are at the quantity and quality of the functions we shipped in V1 so it was probably the right thing to do.  <Teaser> Still, I’d die for another opportunity to ship transactional cmdlets ….  wait – I’m getting ahead of myself.  We’ll talk more about that later.  🙂 </Teaser>

One big caveat to share with you around remoting.  The good news is that we’ve made a lot of progress on remoting and it is shaping up nicely.  The bad news is that (FOR THIS CTP) remoting is only going to work FROM and TO Vista and WS08 boxes (CRINGE!).  I know that is a big hit and it means that many of you will not be able to test out remoting for us.  Apologizes.  There are a zillion details behind this so without going into them, all I can say is 1) we know exactly how BIG of a deal this is 2) we worked like heck to try and make it happen 3) the facts we were faced did not allow it to happen.

Just to be clear, this applies to the upcoming CTP and we are working very hard to make it available on downlevel machines in subsequent public releases.

When will the next CTP be available?  Watch this space.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows Management Partner Architect
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