As far as I know, there's no official release date for now. So, as usual, the answer is: "it will be available when it's ready" (and very sadly, probably even a bit earlier).

No other Beta after beta 2 is expected. Officially, all Ms do now is fix all the bugs, and make sure everything work nicely. (Plus finish some small features.) No big changes are done anymore.

I think you can expect RTM for the last quarter of this year.

Have a nice day,
jods

PS:
RTM will also require you to remove Beta 1;
If you have Beta 1, you should be able to use generics ;-)

I agree that it's very stable. But the base librairies are full of bugs. After just one month of light usage, I've reported 4 unique bugs. And it looks like I'm not alone: there are tons of bug reports! Looking at it right now, there are 1532 active bugs, 452 bugs being filed last week.

But septembre is possible... let's hope!

DrGUI, yes the bugs usually are in the new bits. And they usually aren't critical ones. I could find a workaround for every bug I found in beta 2 (which was not the case in beta 1).

But no, Ms doesn't keep pushing bug fixes. Remember it is a beta, and as such you are warned that it does contain bugs. Bug fixes will be available with the RTM. (or with CTP, if there are any to come (probably)).

VS 2006 ? :-) Didn't the same thing happen to Win95 ?
Honestly, I think that VS will ship this year, even if it's late this year ;-)

Quote:Original post by jods
VS 2006 ? :-) Didn't the same thing happen to Win95 ?

Windows 95 was launched here in the states on August 24th, 1995. Many computer stores (like CompUSA) were opening at midnight just for the release. Hundreds of geeks were waiting outside for their copy (myself included).

Anyways, I agree that the compiler is very stable but the framework libraries, especially the System.Data library and wizards, are very buggy. In fact, our company decided not to port our 125,000 line database application to 2.0 because of the shear number of problems getting it to compile under 2.0 Beta 2 (all DataSet and databinding related). Ironically, it compiles and runs flawlessly without warning or error under 2.0 Beta 1.

Several breaks in compatibility that I reported to Microsoft were classified as being "By Design". I cannot afford to debug and redesign the data access layer of a 125,000 line app. If Microsoft ignores this break in compatibility, most developers will remain in with VS 2002 or VS 2003.

There are also several critical features/bug fixes missing that were cut out of the final product:
1) The data wizard still uses @@IDENTITY instead of SCOPE_IDENTITY() in the T-SQL code it generates for data adapters. If your table has a trigger that inserts into another table, the wrong identity is retured.
2) The introduction of nullable types is useless with database apps because the code generator for Typed Datasets does not support nullable types. You still need to call IsFieldNull() and SetFieldToNull() methods. To support nullable types with Typed Datasets naturally, you must code the dataset yourself.
3) The data wizard still ignores the presence of a ROWSTAMP/TIMESTAMP field to use for optimistic concurrency. Instead, it still passes the original values for all the fields to be checked in a DELETE or UPDATE statement. Of course, if you use BLOB fields such as NTEXT, TEXT and IMAGE, they will never get checked since you cannot compare them using T-SQL.