Origin of "FrankenBuild"
One thing I realized (too late) is that I need to be more careful about picking funny terms to describe things.
In early 2004 we had made a new build of the CLR 2.0 we were checking into Windows that did not (yet) have a Visual Studio 2005 that worked with it. It turned out we couldn't get a build of VS for at least 8 weeks, yet we needed to have something people could use. So we wound up cobbling together some hacked up debugger DLLs that could be debugged from VS 2003. I called that "The Combo Platter". Imagine my horror three weeks later when I wound up in a Jim Allchin review and the topic came up. You don't want the President of your division to have to say the words "Combo Platter" when describing the latest build of your software :) Jim was never really a fan of cute names in the first place, making it that much more fun (we gave the BRS, aka "Big Red Switch", a very formal name like "Version Lock Back Key" for this reason).
Later that same year we again had to check in a new build of NETFX into Windows for an internal drop to help a partner team (well before Beta). The problem was not all of the teams were in the same branch. It had to get done quickly, so Larry Sullivan created what he called a "Frankenstein Build" because it had DLLs pulled from lots of different branches that weren't necessarily designed for each other. But with some creative stitching you could get it to work. I shortened this to "FrankenBuild" for the drop and we checked into Windows. Now three years later I see it showing up on EWeek and other sites.
Thank goodness "Combo Platter" never caught on...
Comments
Anonymous
April 01, 2007
One new subscriber from Anothr Alerts:jigar.programmer@gmail.comAnonymous
April 02, 2007
I allways thought that Microsoft have some idealistic processes ... I know fill more confident in my company :p