John,
Thanks for the response, although my question was not about beta licensing
or future updates... I will restate.
Last I heard Whidbey should be released in first-half of 2005. It's pretty
hard for me to create a powerful, stable application in under 5 months,
regardless of the tools used (which, to us, are the least important items
when compared to design strategy and implementation).
I may not be the majority here, but I'd rather have myself and my dev's
working with Whidbey and .NET 2 from the point that it is a relatively
stable beta, and watch what changes occur between now and release. This way,
come release date, we're already familiar with the old, the new, and the
little quirks of both, ready to apply .NET 2 technologies to our .NET 1.1
production apps. I feel it gives us a bit of a strategic advantage in
learning the technology and is worth spending the dev time on. If we happen
to come up with a good app before the release, then we might just have to
wait until the magic license fairies fly down and sprinkle the "use in
production" dust on the code before we put a 'done' stamp on it.
My purpose in asking is simply to find out... "are we at that point yet?"
I realize that as a MS Director you can't really, legally say "yeah! it's
stable!" until the day of release, so I'm a little more interested in people
outside of MS who have been actively beta testing -- which Peter pointed
out, might be well suited for the other newsgroup.
Thanks!
Brandon