C# this week: 2/4/2005

Our shut down of Whidbey Beta2 continued this week, with ask mode beginning last Monday. Jay, Kartik and I began holding a "ship-room" meeting twice a day, where teams came in with their bugs and justified fixing them. This slowed down our bug fixes, but also helps make sure we fix the right set of bugs and keep regressions down. To give an idea, this week we've fixed about 30 bugs, whereas the last two weeks we fixed about 120-140. Beta2 - it is a shutting down.

We took some interesting bugs this week. We took security fixes, where we were pretty sure we were safe, but we did it to be extra safe. We took fixes in Intellisense, for scenarios that werent huge, but we were worried you wouldnt give us feedback on some changes we'd made since Beta1 because you ran into this issue. We approved bugs for diagnosing debugger failures - a common problem we've seen in past releases. We took our share of crashes and hangs as well.

Next week our team begins its full test pass for Beta2, where QA run their automation and all their manual tests. This should go for a couple of weeks. This is very in-depth testing, to make sure that the product is solid. The triage team is secretly quaking in its boots about the hours we will have to spend triaging those incoming bugs.

The triage team also kicked in this week to start planning how to slice and dice the bugs in the next (last) milestone. We sat around one evening in Jays office, and planned out when to triage the bugs in there, and when to ZBB on those bugs by (ZBB == Zero bug bounce == Have fixed all those bugs opened more than 48 hours ago).

Next week I also send out a report on our community efforts for this months. We are doing a more structure month-month plan around community, and it should be exciting to see the changes we made in the last month. I'll try to blog the results as well. One item I'm excited about - we plan to keep an eye on the private Whidbey newsgroups in a more conscientious fashion than before. We've gotten complaints that no-one replies to them and we are looking to fix that.

This week, I also happened to go to the University of Washington and present to Prof. Andersons class on cool features of the Everett tools. The class is using Everett with the Tablet PC SDK to build cool projects and they plan to demo in March. I love the projects - Diagram Recognition, Handwriting editors, Shared papers - just neat stuff. Providing cool tools to help write cool code just kicks rear. And it was even better when I showed them Whidbey and expansions and the class went "oooh".

Shaykat

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 04, 2005
  It'd be cool, costly and resource intensive and useless and very cool to have some machine directly connected to internet where people registered to PFC could reserve maybe 20 minutes a week, distributed in anyway they like over the days, to log on using remote assistance or similar and which would be automatically updated to have the latest build that happens to pass nightly tests & start :)
  
  This way instead of waiting months for beta or ctp to see if the favourite bug was fixed or whether some function works intuitively you could check it right away. Well quite useless stuff, but it'd be very cool..
• Anonymous
  February 10, 2005
  Hello!!
  
  
  
  Please, I like of receive tutor and apotilas de programing in C#,