Madness? Is it contagious? What's this all about?
Community Technology Previews (CTPs) are regular interim releases of Microsoft
technologies while they are still under active development. These CTPs have
offered the community unprecedented near-real-time access to what is going on
at Microsoft and they have enabled Microsoft to get customers’ feedback in a
timely and relevant way. Microsoft offers CTPs for many of our major developer
platforms including Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, WinFX (which includes
Avalon and Indigo), and SQL Server.
However, we have seen a condition emerge in frequent users of CTPs that has
come to be known as “CTP Madness”. This condition emerges when a developer
tries one CTP (say the latest build of Avalon and Indigo) only to find out it
will not install because of the build of the .NET Framework they have
installed. The condition gets worse when the developer is unable to locate the
correct version of the .NET Framework that works both with the SQL Server build
and VS build they need to use.
Symptoms of CTP Madness include:
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Excessive use of VPC images (7 or more on given box)
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Two or more machines in a zombie state due to install\uninstall issues
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Regular (weekly or even daily) machine flattening
Well, Doctors Abrams and
Sutherland
(working closely with Chief of Staff
Torre) have developed a remarkable cure for CTP Madness. The solution
is this xml file: BuildData.xml. This
file contains all the secrets of making pre-release builds work together. The
application below uses this data to clearly show what builds are compatible. In
addition we use the browsercaps to show you what appears to be installed on
your machine right now.
You are welcome, even encouraged, to build your own front end to this data. We
will keep the build data up to date here regularly. Remember that the
Sandbox is a great place to share your cool stuff.
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CTP Build Finder
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You currently have the following builds installed
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Please select a product:
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.Net Framework V2.0 Beta1 (RETIRED) is compatabile with: Visual Studio 2005 Beta1 (June '04) Downloads: General VC#: RETIRED VB.NET: RETIRED SQL Server Express Beta2 (July '04) Downloads: x86: RETIRED Avalon November CTP (January '05) Downloads: x86: RETIRED
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