Whidbey Beta 2 end game

ScottGu posted very good description on our Beta 2 end game process. A biggest change from previous releases to my opinion is that very few bugs will be moved to RTM bucket. We at Web.NET are trying hard not to postpone anything to post-Beta 2 milestone. This effectively means that Beta 2 quality is expected to be much higher compared to what typical 'beta' used to be. I would dare to say the product will be darn close to ship quality. This may also give you some explanation why some features were cut: we'd better ship high quality product than a product with a lot of features that don't quite work.

Security push is closing on us. This does not mean we didn't pay attention to security until Beta 2. We did perform threat analysis and modeling and fixed any bugs filed as result of the security reviews. Everything is compiled with /GS flag. We have new tools for static code analysis of native and managed code. They are able to discover many security issues including buffer overruns, integer overflows as well as memory corruptions and plain crashes that may occur under some obscure conditions. We don't run them on every build since it takes quite a bit of time to run full analysis, but they do get run on a regular basis. We at VWD team haven't been getting many issues since we got rid of static buffers and unsafe APIs back in VS 2003 cycle. However, final pass when 100% of the time is dedicated to security reviews, tests and fixes is always a Good Thing.

Two and a half weeks to ZBB...