Scott Guthrie blogged that
the launch date for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework will be delayed. They are
delaying the release to fix some performance problems. Also according to the blog
there will be a release candidate in February with
a broad “go live” license that supports production deployment
I think this is a win-win-win situation for most developers. Let me explain.
The first win is that we get a much better product. Most developers I know want to
work with the latest and greatest tools. They are willing to suffer through poor performance
or some bugs to be on the bleeding edge. With the extra time we won’t have to curse
our tools under our breath waiting for service pack 1.
The second win is that we can actually put code into production faster. Since the
RC will have a “go live” license I can deploy my applications sometime in February
with the RC rather than waiting for the launch in March.
The third win that I see is that we get more say into shaping the future of the tool
that most of us live in each day. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that Microsoft
will be slipping in new features but we have the ability to comment for a longer period
and possibly influence what will go into the version of Visual Studio after this.
Scott Guthrie has graciously posted his e-mail address for feedback and there is the
connect site as well. I am sure that Microsoft tries to listen to feedback all of
the time but human nature being what it is and scheduling and all I am sure they are
more focused on gathering and prioritizing feedback during the beta cycle.
The people who stand to loose the most from this announcement are those who either
by choice or company policy are not allowed to use beta software in production. Since
Scott’s post states the launch will be moved back a few weeks I don’t think it will
be that much longer to wait.
It is also nice to see Microsoft reacting to our feedback and changing something as
public as the launch date to make sure that the product is stable and usable. I can
think back not too many years when the reaction might have been very different and
they would have just moved up the date for the first service pack.
Read the complete post at http://www.grokdev.com/Blogs/scott/2009/12/18/NET4AndVisualStudio2010ReleaseDelayed.aspx