views:

554

answers:

4

I'm very interested in using 4.0 framework and also the Entity Framework 4.0. Currently .net 4.0 is in CTP and I'm EF 4.0 is in CTP Preview. I will not be coding for a few more months, but i'm not so sure that either .net 4.0 or EF 4.0 will be RTM by then.

My questions:

1) Regarding Microsoft Products, is CTP usually stable enough for production?

2) If I use CTP initially and then want to upgrade to RTM when it's available should i expect a lot of pain in the upgrade? or is RTM usually "backwards compatible" with the CTP?

+10  A: 

Often beta and CTP products aren't even licensed for production use, regardless of stability. You should check what the licence says before anything else - assuming you care about legality, of course.

There will often be a fair amount of change between CTP and release, but less between beta and release, and even less between RC and release.

Btw, .NET 4.0 is in beta 1, not CTP.

Jon Skeet
Yes legality is important to me - i'll look into the licensing. And yes .net 4.0 sure is beta 1...not sure how i missed that. Thanks.
Tone
+3  A: 

For .NET 4.0 neither the CTP nor the currently available Beta 1 of .NET 4.0 is licensed for production use.

Microsoft's previous behavior has that Beta 2 is normally under their Go Live licensing which allows for some production use. There is a comment from Somasegar on this blog post that says that they will release a Go Live version "at a later date."

I can only speak for .NET 4.0 and not EF, but we have been writing production code with it for a while and while there were some breaking changes between CTP and Beta 1 there do not look to be as many breaking changes between Beta 1 and Beta 2.

Joe Kuemerle
how can one see the list of breaking changes that you reference here?
ChrisHDog
I don't think MS explicitly listed breaking changes between the CTP and Beta 1 but there are numerous documents of what breaking changes were made between Beta 1 and Beta 2. I don't see a single comprehensive list but a quick search turns up BCL, WCF, WF and ASP.NET results.
Joe Kuemerle
A: 

I really wanted to post a comment but I could not..

I want to ask if EF is stable in .Net 4.0. I am planning to do the TDD with EF and the document states that this version supports this.

Harsha
You should post this as a different question. It seems like a valid one.
Richard Szalay
I agree - this should be a new question
Tone
A: 

As others noted, both the beta and CTP licenses do not allow deployment on a prod server.

On the other hand, as MS will delay the release of both VS 2010 and the .net fx 4.0, the release candidate versions will have their licensing changed to allow for use in production.

More info here.

Diogo