Here's the Thing about BETAs

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The thing is, the reason for all these fixes and workarounds is partly because the developers at Microsoft are testing their installations on pristine machines with a fresh OS and a brand new Registry. But the developers out here (you and me) aren't doing that. We're installing it on a working development machine (yeah, yeah, I know what they say, but nobody listens) and so we need to uninstall our old BETA or CTP and try to install the new guy. The uninstalls leave orphaned Registry entries (that's the primary culprit) that interfere with the new guy getting in and being completely happy.

So you have junk where you either can't install, or your Help doesn't work, or your IIS ASP.NET Tab isn't there, and so on, ad - infinitum.

So what's the answer? Well, you can't change human nature. We aren't going to stop installing BETAs and CTPs on our regular development boxes. What the people at Microsoft need to do is spend more time doing it the same way we do it, and they'll discover these issues before they make a release.

Hey, nobody EXPECTS a BETA to be perfect. But, you can still do a lot to make the developer's experience a better one.
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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