More Information on VS 2005 Community Tech Previews

Dan seems to have started the information flow and now I’ve received IMs from at least four people asking me some questions on the subject. So, in the interest of heading some questions off I decided it would be better for me to ask for forgiveness rather than permission and answer the common questions.

As Dan points out “the first community tech preview of Visual Studio 2005 will be given out at VSLive this week!!”

If you are currently a Whidbey Alpha participant you will also be getting discs and should be receiving mail later today or early tomorrow that explains the timing and gives you more detail about the program.

If you are an MSDN Universal Subscriber or PDC customer with Alpha bits you should also hear more information in the next couple of weeks about how you can get access to the previews and participate.

These builds will not be for the faint of heart or for someone without a machine to experiment with. They will essentially be the same builds the VS team delivers to internal partner teams for use. They receive only slightly more testing than a regular drop, but far far less testing than actual beta builds would see. Though, many of us have been dogfooding with these types of builds for a long time and I’m generally impressed with what I can accomplish.

This is the first time our teams have done anything like this so please bear with us because I’m confident we’ll be making adjustments to the Tech Preview program as we go to accommodate you guys.

If I spoke incorrectly in this post I’ll be sure to follow up with a new post and a correction. I look forward to hearing feedback from everyone.

Enjoy!