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The issue of Whidbey delay is not an emotional one

Reading this blog entry from Jason Mauss, I think he misses the point of all the complaining surrounding the Whidbey delay. OK, maybe not all of the complaining, but certainly my complaining.

The information behind the delay, coming from Tom Rizzo anyway in the eWeek article, is that they want a simultaneous release because that'd be really cool. If that's not true, then someone needs to do some damage control for Rizzo.

That's the core of the soreness I'm sure for most people. Whidbey isn't perfect now, but it's sure in remarkable shape for something that isn't even beta yet. Us ASP.NET developers in particular have had to “fight” with Visual Studio and work the way it says we should, not the way that makes sense for us. Whidbey fixes that.

The related issue is that the new features can solve real problems today, in far less time than if we had to deal with them ourselves. Master pages, membership, personalization... these are all things that make our lives easier when responding to our customers. Sure, Microsoft can't be blamed for not delivering these things, but it's too late, they put them out there for us to see, and now we want it. This isn't an emotional issue, it's an issue of us being able to work better, work faster and make more money.

It's all about the bling for me. I could care less about using exciting new stuff for the sake of being exciting.

8 Comments

  • Exactly.



    As a related question: Am I the only one who finds it weird that all the MS bloggers here haven't mentioned a single word on this issue? They all babble along as if nothing happened...

  • Whatever... don't make it my problem. Visual Studio has been broken since the day it was released in terms of Web development. I have an annoying client right now that read about standards compliance and validators and he gets his panties in a bunch because <HR> isn't correct markup, but <hr /> is.



    So yeah, I should stop paying attention. That would be a fabulous career move on my part. Good thinking.

  • You seem to be under the mistaken impression that Whidbey can solve your problems today. It can't. Not next week, either. Maybe when it hits Beta 1, but that is NOT today.

  • According to you? It sure seems to work for me.



    What's with everyone telling me what I need?

  • According to Microsoft, Whidbey is not yet beta quality. According to the presenters at DevDays today, Whidbey is not yet beta quality. I saw 3 versions of Whidbey demonstrated today, all 3 with different feature sets, none with the full set. None working well enough to be considered beta quality. None of them with fully working features (i.e., one build had Whitehorse but it was not fully functional, the presenter explained, mentioned, and pointed out a few features that are almost there or are there but just don't work yet).



    If Whidbey works for you, either you have a newer version than any I've seen or heard of, or you're not working it very hard.

  • Shannon: Within a few weeks the alpha tester group gets new bits of whidbey, we'll see what's true / false of what's working and what's not.



    It's definitely not feature complete as new features are still debated in the alpha tester forums, but it gets close. Being not-feature complete means that it is not beta yet. Beta 'quality' means nothing btw. Beta means: feature complete, let the testing begin.



    Whitehorse is an add-on to vs.net, not a main part. Whitehorse was barely runnable in the first alpha we saw. But it's March, not October.



    No matter what, the pushback of the release date creates a big problem. ASP.NET development IS broken in vs.net 2003, the HTML editor is horrible. It might sound weird, but ASP.NET is the major .NET feature which makes people use .NET in the first place: a lot of websites currently using ASP and for example Oracle are ported to ASP.NET.



    If developers have to wait for more than a year before a decent ASP.NET editor is released, what to do? And don't expect a 3rd party editor which solves the problems: any 3rd party editor developer knows that ASP.NET 2.0 totally changes the picture.



    As an O/R mapper vendor I should be glad Objectspaces is pushed back for more than a year. In a wicked way I am, but just a little, and for the most part I'm not all that happy with this delay. .NET 2.0 solves a lot of problems and can bring a lot of good things I really need but now I have to wait for a long period of time before I can start updating the code with f.e. generics, true IXmlSerializable support, design time databinding of my objects etc.

  • Of course, Shannon... I must be imagining things. Thanks for setting me straight.

  • Jeff - I wasn't trying to make an attack, I don't think my tone came across correctly. I was honestly offering that (ignoring pre-release material) as a valid solution which really does work for a lot of people. I was responding to your specific statement:

    "but it's too late, they put them out there for us to see, and now we want it"

    That, to me, sounds like you are sorry that you know what they are working on.

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