It has been a long hard march the last few weeks, but we finished up both our
full test pass and hit
ZBB this week. We officially declared ZBB early Saturday morning (around 4am) when the last bug more than 48-hours old was checked in.
We were a little worried about our ZBB date over the last few weeks as the trend line was looking like we might be a little late. But the team really responded well and the pace of fixes accerated dramatically in recent weeks to bring us back on schedule. We fixed an eye-popping 1142 bugs during the last 3 weeks alone (an average checkin fix rate of over 76 a day).
All in all, this leaves us in very good shape for ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer. The only bugs still active in our
bug system were ones found either Thursday or Friday -- we haven't postponed anything to be fixed beyond Beta2. We are starting our big security push on Monday, during which time we'll code review every single line of code in the product hunting for possible security issues. This process will take 4-6 weeks as there are a large number of checks and balances in place to make sure everything gets done right (there is also a heck of a lot of code <g>).
After this finishes, we'll then start the final Beta2 push -- during which time we'll slow the rate of checkins and raise the stress quality. We'll also then start the process of deploying pre-beta2 bits on Microsoft internal and external web sites to get real-world bugs that will ensure the the readiness of the product for production scenarios. All of this will still take some time (apologies for the delay), but I think it will definitely be worth the wait....