Well I said I’d post some more detailed information about
the new version of SQL Prompt so I thought I’d better get down to it. I wanted
to do this to coincide with getting the release candidate out there, which we’d
planned on being this Friday, however we all had a bit of a rush of blood to
the head at about 5 o’clock yesterday afternoon and decided to just jolly well
release it, and frankly I’m glad. We were holding on only due to a couple of
issues with the installer:
- If
Visual Studio 2005 has never been used prior to installing SQL Prompt 3.5
then the SQL Prompt menu will not appear until Visual Studio is restarted.
I can’t imagine too many people are going to run into this one, however if
you have I apologise. The reason we encountered it is that we generally do
install testing using virtual machines, which although I hate them with a
raging passion, do have some uses.
- If
you’re upgrading from 3.1 the tray application restarts during the
installation but SQL Prompt won’t work in Query Analyzer until you
manually restart it again. This is clearly going to affect a lot more
people, however we decided that it wasn’t serious enough to hold up the RC
any more.
I must admit it felt just slightly cavalier, however when
you bear in mind that we’d been trying to fix just these two issues since last Thursday you can see why some of
us might have been losing the will to live because they were holding us up from
making any real progress and (1) in particular just isn’t that big a deal.
So… it’s out there in the wild, and already we’ve had one
person who’s reported an issue with VS 2005 that’s likely to affect a number of
people that we wouldn’t have found for some days, if at all, and which we’ll be
fixing for the final release. And that’s why we released it: we reached the
point where the user feedback was the thing we most needed. Getting a few
hundred, or even a few dozen, people with widely varying system configurations
to take an early look at a product is a really good way to shake out those last
few pesky bugs.
There’s a whole philosophical debate then about whether or
not this really constitutes a release candidate if we’re intending to make some
changes, however what I’d say is this: we put out a release candidate when we
think something is good enough to release (apart from the installer issues in
this case), but I have never yet
worked on a product here at Red Gate where we didn’t end up fixing at least a
couple of bugs between the RC and the final release, so in this case we just
did the pragmatic thing and kicked it out the door.
Anyway, I’ve deviated somewhat from the point, and now I'm (again) running out of time. In my last post I briefly listed some of the new features and
enhancements we’ve added so over my next few posts I’m going to
take a look at these things individually along with a few other improvements in more detail.