Blame me if you don’t see Brief or Emacs keybindings in the Beta 2 Standard SKU

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Update:   Sean has a much better workaround at https://blogs.msdn.com/vseditor/archive/2005/04/26/412307.aspx

Sometimes being a QA reminds me of when I was a soccer referee – you’re only as good as your last call or the last bug you missed. 

I’ve seen a couple of MSDN forum posts now about missing Brief and Emacs keybindings, so I figured this issue merits a post here.

It’s a known issue that the Brief and Emacs keybindings are missing from the Beta 2 Standard SKU.  The workaround, as stated in the Beta 2 Readme is as follow:
Install Visual C++ Express SKU to the same folder as Visual Studio Standard SKU

Let’s see how transparency works here about how this bug came to pass.  Can’t wait to view the comments.  We have lots of different runs on lots of different builds, Skus, platforms, different applied vssettings files, different operating systems, and different languages.  At some point in time, we had a run against the Standard SKU, where the Brief and Emacs nightlies failed because the keybindings were not present.  I incorrectly analyzed the failure as a lab/installation issue, because there was only one machine available, so I couldn’t compare it to anything else.  First lesson learned is that I should have installed the Standard SKU on an ad-hoc machine and verified it, but I was swamped for those couple of months (very very swamped).  We were supposed to have another Standard SKU run the next week or the week after that, but the run schedule was trimmed back, and I forgot about the Standard SKU issue with everything going on.  Second lesson learned is that I should have setup a reminder to double-check such issues after a week or two.

I don’t think I can talk (yet) about how many bugs I’ve found during the last full test pass, or how many test cases I executed per day for those weeks, or how many bugs I found that did make the beta 2 bar to justify missing this bug.  I’m hoping this is the worst bug that got though. I’m pretty confident you’ll find a high quality Beta 2 release for the Editor.  And if not, you know where to find me =)