Hey all,
In regards to VS 2010 Beta 2 support, consider the development cycle for a company like Telerik or any other component vendor. We are working towards a few different things with every release, and while not a totally inclusive list, it would look something like:
- Provide fixes, upgrades, and optimizations for current controls
- Introduce new controls based on community feedback and market demand
- Update support resources and documentation for all new products and changes to existing products
- Support the latest and greatest of what is out there to stay on the bleeding edge of .Net development
Keeping this in mind, consider the fact that we are also in a competitive market. So we are also constantly working to improve our value for customers at a time when you can find a lot of neat things on Codeplex and by simply hitting up Google and Bing to see what someone has done with the latest 3.x preview build or leaked 4.0 build of Silverlight and responding to custom inquiries why our well thought out and long planned release doesn't have support for these things.
The reality behind all this is that when we ship a release, like Q3, we know customers intend to be able to put this into their current stable development environment and start using it on all of their projects. Keep in mind the bold in the previous sentence, because VS 2010 Beta 2 is still a beta IDE, and while we are planning to provide support for it, with a very strict release cycle and working to get as many features from our roadmap into the release as possible, unfortunately that is something which had to go on the back burner. Using beta software, especially a beta IDE, is a risk for any developer since it isn't guaranteed to work at production quality. Just the same as we don't expect someone to have used our Q3 beta releases in a production level product, generally speaking nobody should be using a beta IDE for production level work. Beta releases are out there to solicit feedback and to ensure that problems and kinks are worked out for the final release.
With all this being said, the final weeks/days leading up to the release involves a lot of testing, final tweaks, and fixes to ensure we're shipping the strongest release possible. This time around one of those considerations was to either work hard on solidifying the release for current stable developer environments or work on support for the VS 2010 Beta IDE, and we chose the first option. Not that we don't plan on supporting the new beta, we have every intention to, but with the knowledge that changes we make to support VS2010 Beta 2 could break in the VS 2010 RC (since one can assume there will be one), we wanted to ensure the best experience for everyone and not sacrifice any of the things we wanted to do in the release and thus had to make that decision.
Long story short, support will be coming but not quite yet. If you have any further questions into how we plan our releases or the priorities of one choice we've made versus another, definitely let us know. We value community feedback of all sorts and can appreciate the fact that people want to start using our controls in the new designer, and we hope you understand the reasoning why our VS 2010 Beta 2 support was pushed back a little bit.
-Evan