Brian Harry, Microsoft Technical Fellow and Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server (TFS) has commented about my last post “No public VS 2010 Beta 3 or release”. (Brian is making a huge effort in transparency about the performance problems of VS 2010 Beta 2 and the work to get them fixed for RTM)

I reproduce his comments here:

“I don’t know Quan but I can say definitively that this is not an official Microsoft communication.  I’ve remarked before (on my blog) that when you have an organization of 2,000 – 3,000 people, you have to assume random stuff happens.  Said another way “Don’t believe everything you read” 🙂

1) We’ve had an RC on the books from the beginning.  We are investigating the possibility of making it a public release.  We didn’t originally for that but the Beta 2 feedback has made us rethink it. We will ensure that there is time to incorporate customer feedback. Quan wrote this a while ago and, to be honest, I’m not sure we had reached that conclusion yet.

2) We haven’t decided what we are going to call the public release yet.  We’ve discussed both “Release Candidate” and “Beta 3”.  I responded to one comment on this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/12/05/anatomy-of-a-performance-problem.aspx with some thoughts on this. Regardless of what we call it, we will be looking for customer feedback/validation and will allot time to get it before releasing.

3) March 22 is NOT the release date. It never was. March 22 is the marketing launch date. We generally don’t announce RTM dates ahead of time but we do communicate launch dates.  Sometimes RTM happens before the launch, sometimes after.  I think it’s fair to say that we are targeting an RTM in the general timeframe or we wouldn’t have set the launch date there but there are many considerations that go into launch dates – lining up with other events, hollidays, venue availability, … Further, it would make no sense for us to have set a final RTM date before getting Beta 2 feedback.  We always say “we’ll ship the product when it’s ready”.

Am I the official Microsoft spokesman on this topic, well, um, no. However, I will say that I’m in all of the discussions about when we’ll ship, how do we know, what prereleases will we do, etc, etc.  And those who do actually own the “official responsibility” know I’m writing about it and are keeping quiet.  Maintaining plausable deniability, I think 🙂

If you want to learn more, please visit my blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry.  I’m passionate about shipping a great developer tool and partnering with all of you to accomplish it.  I’m always listening and open for feedback.  Nothing I like more than a productive debate.

Thanks for listening,

Brian”

It’s great that Microsoft is considering another public release before RTM. I know it would be to validate the performance fixes after Beta 2, not because add-ins are broken in the current Beta 2. I am fortunate enough to get the private Limited CTPs (LCTPs) after Beta 2 but I am under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) so I can’t blog about their fixes, workarounds or new problems as I did with the public Beta 1 and Beta 2 in the last months to help others, and my new Microsoft Connect bug reports are now private to Microsoft too. But other developers of add-ins would benefit from that public release, and working add-ins could finally be made available to end users for testing before VS 2010 gets RTM. I wouldn’t have any hope of getting fixes in the automation model between that public release and RTM, though.