As Microsoft pushes toward a major release cycle of not only their flagship OS but also developer tools, things inevitably go wrong. Today, Brian Harry has announced that he is delaying the release of Team Foundation Server 2015 due to defects found during the upgrade process.
I’ve been watching the bugs that have been coming in as a result of our upgrade testing – the severity, the causes and the rate. I’m just not quite happy with where we are. — Brian Harry’s Blog
As a result of delaying the overall release, they are putting out a new Release Candidate (RC2) that is available today at this site. In his blog post, Brian also warns that TFS 2015 RC2 can’t be installed on the same machine as Visual Studio 2015 RC.
Be aware that this TFS RC2 cannot be installed on the same machine as VS 2015 RC. It can be accessed by the VS RC just fine, but not installed on the same machine – this has to do with some versioning issues on some files that are shared between the two releases. — Brian Harry’s Blog
While a delay of new tools is often met with writhing and gnashing of teeth, this delay really speaks to the TFS team’s commitment to releasing a stable product in spite of the difficulties the delay may cause. This delay will mean that for this release at least, TFS will be out of sync with the rest of the developer stack. But he does explain that the delay of TFS 2015 is only on the server components, not other related products.
Because TFS 2015 RTM is delayed the story will be a little more complex. The only thing we are delaying is the TFS 2015 server RTM and the associated Project Server connector. All other TFS related deliverables – Team Explorer, Microsoft Test Manager, Team Explorer Everywhere, Test Agents, etc. will all RTM on or before July 20th. — Brian Harry’s Blog
In this age when it seems like all software is released and adopted during beta, this delay is a refreshing stand for quality and ultimately will be a good thing for Microsoft’s ALM team and all TFS users.