Beta out!

Finally, after some pretty exciting last minute drama with the CD's, the VS 2005 Beta is released! I hope you like the new features we have in the debugger, and I hope you like its stability.

Two of the features I enjoy owning are the new datatips and breakpoints. Datatips are unlike anything you saw in previous versions of VS, and BP has been given a bit of an overhaul to allow setting more conditions, which should be useful to power users. We also support source checksums now, so the old problem of one breakpoint binding to multiple files of the same name is gone.

What did we do to test the debugger? Well we have a list of testcases that we automate. Most testcases tend to be automated, and we run these on different platforms, under different configurations. Others are done manually in a test pass. We had a 3-week test pass for the Beta release, we had another one back in March which was the real bug-fixing pass, this recent one was just for verification, all non-major issues caught here were moved to the live branch, only "severe" issues were fixed in the Beta tree.

The quality of the beta release (or product release in general) depends on the variety of platform configurations tested on, and the quality of the testcases themselves. I like to think we have a decent list of testcases, and how we come up with the cases is a different topic altogether. The intangible is how a manual test is performed and how an automated test is written, given a testcase you can perform it as badly or well as you like (testcase : verify that you can step into GetEnumerator from MoveNext for an Iterator - how many types of Iterators do you need to be sure that this is "ok"?), and it is often difficult to say whether the coverage was "proper".

One measure of goodness of scenarios we use is code coverage, though this is a time consuming activity.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2004
  So... where are they? I saw hundreds of "VS 2005 Beta 1" posts in my RSS aggregator today... but have not been able to find the bits. The only note I see in the MSDN Subscriber section says that it will be available in a few days.
• Anonymous
  June 29, 2004
  Hi Josh,
  
  You can get the Beta from the msdn website - there are links on the homepage http://msdn.microsoft.com/.
  
  This link is the Beta homepage - http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/
  
  Regards,
  D.V.
• Anonymous
  June 29, 2004
  Hmmm... I'm still not seeing it. I only see download links for the "Express" versions. I'm looking for Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1, which is what I assumed everyone is talking about.
  
  This is the text I see for VS 2005 Beta 1:
  "How to get it
  MSDN Subscribers will be the first to receive Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1, which will be available for subscriber download within just a few days. MSDN Subscribers will also receive Beta 1 in their next MSDN shipments. Within a few weeks, non-subscribers will also be able to order a copy of Beta 1 for a nominal fulfillment fee."
  from http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/get/default.aspx
  
  
• Anonymous
  June 29, 2004
  Agreed. I must confess I took it for granted that I would be able to download it and uninstalled VS 2003.
  
  We have an MSDN subscription but it's not available there either.
• Anonymous
  July 02, 2004
  The public downloads for the full Enterprise version will be available as the msdn site states. I want you to know that you do not need to uninstall VS 2003 to use VS 2005 Beta. The products are meant to work side by side and in fact we take a lot of time testing this scenario and fixing bugs so this is ok. You can even have VS 2002, 2003 & 2005 on the same machine and each product should continue to work correctly. Different Express versions can also be installed side by side, you don't need 5 machines for the 5 express drops. However VS 2005 Express & Enterprise cannot be installed side by side which is mentioned in the Readme.
  
  Regards,
  D.V.
  
• Anonymous
  June 16, 2009
  PingBack from http://workfromhomecareer.info/story.php?id=14573