From our mouths to your ears in Internet time

It’ll be a little while before the official transcript of the chat yesterday is posted up, but Tom already has a pretty accurate list of the highlights. One interesting aside he made was:

BTW: In case you couldn’t imagine this yourself: I like VB.NET and hope we won’t see any “last minute changes” like we saw with the first release of Visual Basic .NET. I was really happy with some features that were introduced in the first beta of Visual Basic .NET (like short circuit evaluation) that I was a little disappointed when I read/experienced they were removed or were moved to different keywords (OrElse and AndAlso in case of short circuit evaluation). But such things can happen when you start working with beta software…

As far as beta releases go, we explicitly try not to make radical changes between beta releases. By the time we reach beta, things should be relatively stable so that people can reasonably see how the product will work in a real production environment. While we can make design changes between beta and sometimes add or remove things based on feedback or further experience with the feature in the wild, the VS 2002 beta cycle was extraordinary in a lot of ways. Users should expect that, from a language perspective at least, the beta releases should be pretty stable. Although I reserve the right to eat those words, should the need arise…

I’ll add, though, that all bets are off when it comes to alpha releases such as the one that we’re going to be releasing at the PDC. Since what you’re getting, again from a language perspective, is not even what we consider a finished product, things may change substantially between alpha and beta. Mostly it will be new stuff that’s been coming online after we dropped the alpha, but there is some stuff that we’ll likely be fiddling with. So caveat emptor on that.

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