Just noticed this article "Microsoft to preview Whidbey toolset" in the Register. Just a reminder, sign up for the DevDays if you want the tech preview of Whidbey. If you have been impressed with the announced feature sets of Whidbey from PDC, you'll be even more surprised with the tech preview. Mathematically, with a third milestone down, there should be an additional 50% more unannounced features (or at least 50% more development work) debuting in this release. Also, the previously announced features will probably have been solidly tested by now.
UPDATE: Some bloggers still continue to believe the tech preview will be the PDC version. I hope not; that version was a little too buggy and incomplete for my taste. I also have a hard time believing that Microsoft would send each person a version of Whidbey that is eight months old. There's been ample time to produce an update. The product is due out this year, so the beta period (usually six months long) needs to start very soon. A recent post by an MS blogger that the runtime version has been officially updated from 1.2 to 2.0 confirms to me that this indeed is a newer version.
UPDATE: Most old articles that I have seen from the past refer to the beta as coming in May 2004 (or summer 2004). However, one article mentions an updated version of Whidbey previewed late next March at VSLive in San Francisco, followed by a real beta a couple months later. The article mentions Ari Bixmore, program manager of VS.NET, talking about more frequent delivery stream of prerelease bits rather than a traditional incremental beta model. The first devdays is actually in February 23, NYC, so we will know in one week. The eight months figure? I was using the PDC version of Whidbey in August, several months before the conference, so I know when it was frozen.
The reason that I, at least, thought that they will be handing out the PDC version is because of what they're calling it. IIRC, at PDC it was the "Whidbey Technology Preview". Here, for DevDays, the name is extremely similar. I just assumed that they were the same thing.
It would definitely be sweet to get a newer version, though. That's for sure.
Posted by: milbertus | February 06, 2004 at 02:19 PM
FYI: Paul Vick (http://www.panopticoncentral.net/PermaLink.aspx/675b6d0d-5a2f-4220-96f1-a9fdb055f8ac#Comments ) is looking in to the version of Whidbey that's going to be given out at DevDays.
Posted by: milbertus | February 07, 2004 at 07:41 PM