Beta testing time

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 has been released recently, and CMake 2.8 is also in RC mode right now. In case you haven’t done yet, this is the time to give it a try, as Microsoft and Kitware are really into fixing bugs. For instance, nearly all of the bugs I reported in Beta 1 of VS 2010 have been fixed in Beta 2 (on the other hand, a whole crop of new bugs appeared in Beta 2 ;) ) Anyway, if you’ll have to use VS 2010 in the future (I will have to as DirectX only works on Windows), you should really take some time and test your stuff now and report problems, otherwise you’ll end up cursing for the next few years.

For CMake, it’s not that critical, as the release cycle is much shorter, but if you want good support for VS 2010, you should start testing now. My personal project here does not work quite with CMake and VS 2010, but Kitware is very helpful and we’re trying to iron out the last remaining issues.

In my opinion, far too many developers just blame the tools, and never ever report bugs actually. Sure, you can hope that your particular problem gets caught by the QA one day, but reporting really increases the chances. After all, you want your clients to properly report bugs as well instead of spreading bad publicity, don’t you?

Note: I’m not working for Microsoft or Kitware – I just picked those two, as they have products in the making which are likely to impact a lot of developers.