Using Preview Technology in Production Software

Question

What are the pros/cons to using CTP technology for internal production softtware? By internal production I mean it's software we're not selling to anyone else but will be used by a large number of internal employees spread nationally.

I can see the obvious plusses (features and functionality that beats existing systems) and minuses (bugs, lack of support, changes in the interface, risk of discontinuation.) I'd like to hear from people with experience using preview tech in production software and the kinds of hurdles and things that we might not be considering.

The technology in question is the Silverlight Bing map control CTP.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Are you reasonably sure it will work and not kill your employees' pets? Then it ought to be fine.

Seriously, just be sure it works for the target audience.

As always, IMHO.

Answer 2

Personally I don't think it's a good idea, as essentially your internal employees are your market, so this is essentially production software.

So things like licencing, compliance, support, SLA's may need to be thought through.

I know that would be frowned upon by my IT Director and Internal Audit people, to name two.

Answer 3

Sometimes you just dont want to wait for a new feature, for instance we started using SQL Server 2008 in our new architecture just for the DateTimeOffset. We used this application internally, but this wasnt a major deployment. If its stable enough then why not. The Pros are you dont have to wait, you're testing new techniques, code and keeping up with technologies.

The cons are that some features will change, API arent finished or some things get renamed. These things present themselves pretty quickly and are normally easy to change. Also some things may not be documented, but there is always someone blogging about it.

Answer 4

It's a call that can be tough to make and really depends on your circumstances. A beta control from Microsoft, targeted at developers, that fills an immediate and important need, may be just the right fit if you are understanding the lack of support.

Especially given how quickly internal apps and even public sites go through revisions and quick improvement milestones.

The Silverlight Toolkit has been trying a new model for the last year; we've introduced special quality bands, to help customers make a call, and understand the investment and guarantees that the product team is making. I sort of hope we can get other teams to make a similar commitment.

The AutoCompleteBox control was essentially CTP a year ago, in the Preview quality band. Since then we invested and shipped it in the Silverlight 3 SDK as a mature, supported product.

Have a discussion with your management to define what risk you can take on while still enabling your internal users with quality value (scenarios that do work great, regardless of the released quality under the hood).

Consider source code!
One thing that you can also do is have a discussion around source and binaries. Although you won't always have an option to grab the source for many controls or frameworks, there are a lot of open source releases available today. Your control vendor may also be willing to offer a source license.

The cost for maintaining your own private branch of an open source control is high, but it is an avenue that can be explored if you need fixes earlier, want to add your own functionality, or feel that a developer day of work might just get an existing control customized for your scenario.

Updating with some more specific links:

Silverlight Toolkit
Here's more information on the Silverlight Toolkit's Quality Bands, for those that are interested. They are Experimental, Preview, Stable, and Mature; Preview is much like CTP, Preview - Beta, and Mature - Released and supported.

These are all just words, but they are "the word" of the team.

Microsoft Connect
WRT the Bing Maps control, I did see that there is a Microsoft Connect site out there. That's a great resource to have - although I am not in the program, typically Connect sites are there to help provide more frequent drops, a set of forums for discussing any issues, and a way to easily get in contact with the developers and testers on the product.

Other vendors
There are many other vendors out that that provide early releases, feel free to use the comments to add a non-Microsoft angle to this. I wanted to provide my opinion on these topics since I'm pretty familiar with a lot of the Silverlight-specific Microsoft frameworks that are out there.