Visual Studio 2010 RC Update

Visual Studio 2010 RC came out a few weeks ago, and the current VistaDB 4 build 12 does not work.  Build 12 obviously came out before the RC, so it was never tested on that release.

Updating for 2010 RC

The next VistaDB 4.0 build will be updated for Visual Studio 2010 RC.  I was actually of two minds of this issue. If the final (really final) build is only a few weeks away maybe we should just wait for that build.  Microsoft has broken ADO.Net plugins, EF, and several other things we need in EVERY new build of Visual Studio 2010.

Beta 2 left a bad taste

When 2010 Beta 2 shipped we scrambled really hard to get an updated build that worked.  We literally dropped everything else to just focus on those issues for about a week.  My thinking at the time was that if we found errors and got the bugs in quickly to Microsoft they would be fixed for the final release.  We opened 10 tickets with Microsoft on Beta 2 – ALL of them were denied as “too late in cycle to be fixed”.

Too late in cycle?

Ok, so what the heck was the point of calling it a BETA then?  If you had no intention of fixing any issues, you really just wanted people to play with it call it a CTP (Customer Technical Preview).  Beta implies that people should be submitting tickets with issues and they might actually get fixed.

After all that work of building repeatable cases, explanations of how the issues were broken, etc (probably 20+ man hours of work just to file the bugs) it was very upsetting to have all of them just flat rejected.  Even when they acknowledged they were bugs, we were too late to get them fixed.  We don’t get access to any builds before the general MSDN / dev crowd, so how can you get these issues addressed with Microsoft?  Apparently you just can’t, they are going to fix them when they want. 

3+ Years and still waiting

Some of these issues have been in Visual Studio since Visual Studio 2005.  We submitted some of these during the Visual Studio 2008 cycle and were told it was too late, they would be addressed in the next major release. Apparently someone forgot to carry forward the tickets (giving the benefit of the doubt), because they still exist in Visual Studio 2010.

So to people who think us taking a month to fix an issue an release a new build is a very long time, please have a little perspective.  Out of over 50 tickets we have opened with Microsoft since April 2007 only 9 have been fixed.  Some of them were finally fixed in .Net 3.5 SP1 – doesn’t help us unless the user has that on their machine, so we can’t rely on them.  The workarounds we have in place will just have to stay in place.

Next build date?

Sorry, don’t have a specific date for the next build.  We are working on these Visual Studio 2010 RC issues, and we have two other fairly major tickets from customers that we are attempting to get into the next build.  It should be sometime in the next few weeks though.

What about 4.1?

We will wait to ship 4.1 probably until after Visual Studio 2010 ships.  This is for a couple reasons. 

The biggest is that I want to ensure our final build of 4.0 works with 2010.  It will be around a long time, and I don’t want to have to go back and do a 4.0 build after 4.1 comes out.

The second are these customer issues we are working.  They both obviously effect 4.0, and I want them to get into this next 4.0 build.  Then we can roll the changed up to 4.1, but we still have some more testing on 4.1.  I am trying to do some work on some new ways to handle the file system during transactions and updates.  If they work it could give some nice performance boosts to certain modes, but I need more time to get them fully integrated into the 4.1 code and tested.

So, fear not.  4.1 is still waiting in the wings to go out.  The whole Visual Studio 2010 release cycle has sort of stalled things in a lot of ways.