Friday, December 18, 2009

VS2010/.Net 4 release date slips and we get a public RC in February to make up for it (and I’m okay with it)

ScottGu's Blog - Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Update

“…

We’ve been doing an intensive performance optimization push the last two months that is delivering significant performance and virtual memory usage improvements across the product.  The early feedback from a small set of customers testing interim builds since Beta2 has been positive about these improvements. We still have several big performance fixes in the process of being checked in that will improve things even further.

Public Release Candidate

In order to make sure that these fixes truly address the performance issues reported, and to help validate them across the broadest number of scenarios and machine configurations, we’ve decided to ship another public preview release of VS 2010 and .NET 4 before we ship.  Specifically, we plan to make a Release Candidate build available in February that everyone will be able to download and test.  It will be a public build and include a broad “go live” license that supports production deployment

The goal behind the Release Candidate is to get broad feedback on the readiness of the product.  In order to ensure that we are able to receive and react to this feedback, we will also be moving the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 back a few weeks.

…”

I have to think Microsoft is kicking itself for making the March 2010 release date for VS2010 public in October. Yet I’d MUCH rather they make the hard call to push back the release a bit than to have them rush out something that taints Visual Studio image. Visual Studio is to important to to many developers for Microsoft to screw it up by rushing it out. And almost worse, slow/buggy/icky VS2010 IDE could kill the budding real world interest in WPF.

One more release before RTM, keeping my fingers crossed for a win…

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Visual Studio 2010/.Net 4.0 B2 now available via MSDN Subscribers Download, new SKU names (Ultimate, Premium, Express Combo) and VS2010 launch dates announced
VSTS/TFS2010 Beta 2 coming “real soon” and will have a “Go Live” license (i.e. Now’s the time to start getting ready…)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't imagine VS 2010 being any slower than VS 2008 ... errrr ... wait, this is Microsoft, yes I can imagine it.

I gave up on WPF -- just way too slow to work with and to push off on my customers/cleints just not viable. In this economy not many development shops have the luxury of having separate "interface" developers as well as core developers (even in enterprise situations).

I have no idea where Microsoft got the idea for WPF, but it's aimed at a VERY small community of developers out in the real world.

Rob

Anonymous said...

Rob,

I'm not sure why you feel WPF is slow to work with. If you are talking about ramp up speed to learn the WPF framework, then yes, it does take some time. But if you are talking about performance, then I fail to see the problem. Our WPF apps are no less performant than the ones that we created in WinForms.

WPF is the future of Windows UI developement. At least for the next 5-10 years. It's well architected, has a sensible data binding framework, and more importantly takes advantage of you graphics card. GDI is a dead end technology, and MS needs to move forward.

You can argue that OS specific apps are becoming less important due to mobile and web intrusion, and I would agree with you.

Anonymous said...

I think you are missing something Rob. WPF represents a huge paradigm shift in how UI is created. It’s much more versatile and capable than traditional winforms. It is already changing the industry and allowing far more powerful and compelling user experience, interaction and communication. I have experienced no performance hits and a number of performance gains after adopting and adapting to WPF.