Pondering over solution download trends … with three imminent releases lurking behind the horizon

As mentioned in Rangers March 2011 Flash we are getting close to the release of the Build Customization Guide (ATE) and the Lab Management Guide (AHE), both of which are going through a technical review by the product owner and product group and will enter the readability review by UE next week. The teams are waiting in  anticipation for the release, while working on additional backlog items which will most likely be included in the first drop.

In addition we have the next release of the Architecture Tooling Guidance, release 2, which is currently waiting for one last video to be polished.

With the imminent releases it is a good time to have a snapshot of the current Rangers solution download statistics, which we can compare in a few months once the new solutions and the new release mentioned above have settled down on Codeplex.

From the Rangers solutions which we have been tracking since January 2010, the Architecture Tooling Guidance is the 5th most popular, accounting for 7% of the total downloads to date … even though it only released in June 2010.

As highlighted in black, the Architecture guidance had huge blips on the download radar when it launched and then stabilized into a continuous download pattern. What we expect is another few blip spikes when we drop the Release 2.0 bits on Codeplex and the associated Visual Studio Extension ion the Visual Studio Gallery.

Only time will tell …