Gregory Kornblum - Tensai Labs

As we all know service packs are supposed to have fixes and enhancements to existing features. However the Visual Studio 2008 & .NET v3.5 SP1 Beta release had a ton of new features. Some of which people like myself were in desperate need of (BIDS in my case). So I figured beta, can’t be too bad, let me give it a try. I was seriously wrong.

Yes beta has no promise of working correctly at all. However beta is a level above a release quality status called alpha. So there is a certain amount of stability expected. In the case of alpha you know it is going to have serious issues.

Then we have Microsoft releasing a beta version service pack for their latest development tools. Yet, even though they were labeled as beta, they behaved like alpha (or CTP as Microsoft likes to call it). So you have them releasing software with an incorrect status and goes against the service pack quality.

So I am left with the question of why did they do this. I figure the answer is simple. These tools lacked important features to be put in full use. So they release these service packs as beta and cram the necessary new features they require. I figure it is simply because they wanted to show that they were going to fill in the missing pieces and soon.

Ok, this is understandable. Although I don’t have to like it to agree with it. I hope this does not become commonplace for them. SQL 2008 CTP (now RC0 by the way) was allot more stable then these supposed beta releases. Oh well, lets hope to see things like this handled better in the future.