Hi all -



I've read many postings about how stable the StrataFrame betas are and how MicroFour uses the betas when working on their production medical software before the betas even get posted for the rest of us. From the little experience I've had thus far with the betas they certainly do appear stable and perform as advertised.



Still, I'd like to see some comments from folks both in and out of MF regarding how quickly or slowly everyone installs the betas. Among the questions/thoughts I have are the following, although please do not limit the discussion to just these topics.



- For those in a multi-developer shop supporting internal applications, what are the benefits and risks of early use of SF betas?



- In the above environment, how do people handle situations where you've updated to a SF beta, and then need to get a production patch out? Do you maintain a separate development environment with the prior (perhaps production) StrataFrame release to handle production bug fixes?



- For the early adapters among us, has there been "gotchas" from time-to-time that made the early installation of the betas less than ideal.



- For the early adapters among us, has there been times where it turned out to be significantly better to have installed the beta as it resolved some prior bug or provided improved functionality that significantly reduced development time?





I think our shop needs to determine a policy for all StrataFrame developers to either upgrade to the latest beta pretty much as they come out, or just stick to "production" StrataFrame releases. This has been sparked by what I believe to be the well-documented change to the BOs FieldPropertyDescriptors which seems to cause an application we have to work on one developer's workstation but not the other. Either way, we need to pretty much march to the beat of the same drummer so comments on the above will be helpful, I'm sure.



Thanks.

________________

_____/ Regards,

____/ al




________________
_____/ Regards,
____/ al

I have to agree with this being a fairly significant concern, or at least something deserving clear-heading thinking. I tend to prefer to load the betas as they come out for lots of the reasons already mentioned here, but I do want to be able to produce hot fixes as needed.



To that end I am actually considering the benefits of migrating my development environment to a Virtual PC. I can then copy the virtual machine after a build is released to users, and even commit it to source control. In turn, this will give me a way of getting back to the complete and exact development environment--including SF release--that was in place when a production build was released to users.



Thoughts on this approach?




________________
_____/ Regards,
____/ al