i’m pondering another thought from the same individual who posed a previous question to me. part of the comment was also regarding the release of software.
this came about after news of WinFX being officially renamed to .NET Framework 3.0. some of the comments made were dealing with learning a new framework and wishing microsoft would slow down the train on releases. in my response to the comment, i had to think about releases…here’s a comparison (again using PHP as a comparitor because the comment was on an asp.net group)…
- Feb 2002: .NET 1.0 released (beta starting in 1999)
- May 2003: .NET 1.1 released
- Nov 2005: .NET 2.0 released (beta starting in 2003)
- EOY 2006: .NET 3.0 to be released (which is really .NET 2.0 +)
compare that with PHP (only the latest two major versions)
- May 2000: PHP v4 released (beta starting in 1999)
- Jul 2004: PHP v5 released (beta starting in 2003)
so when i look at these, i don’t see a real difference, but yet there are no complaints over releasing new versions of PHP which do include new features (and even broken back compat features)! I see .NET 1 to .NET 2 (i’m not counting the dot release) as a 3 year release cycle. “.NET 3.0” is another year after that, but no significant ground-breaking core framework features…again it is framework+.
so i wonder, do we release software too quickly? being on the inside, i consistently see NUMEROUS requests for more frequent releases. in fact, in our interactions with the open source community, that is one of the top 3 criticisms…not releasing soon enough.