V4 Second look

Now that the real V4 has come out, in the form of SP1 or 4.01 depending upon when you asked the question :-), what is it like ?

What has changed compared to the buggy version brought out in June ?

Well certainly most of the bugs that I have discussed here seem to have been dealt with but some have not and some new ones have appeared, in my estimation SP1 was rushed out the door. The proof of the pudding is often in the tasting as they say concerning food :-) in this case SP1 was supposed to have been release in early november for a limited number of countries and in early december for the rest.

In actual fact the november version was brought out on the 5 of december after a gargantuan effort by everyone to get most things ready, and thereafter on the 22 of december we got the rest. Not a huge delay by any means in software terms especially considering all the teams that had to co-ordinate and deliver in order to meet the deadlines that were originally set.

However the problem was and is that a large number of issues still exist even after the cutoff and as work was being carried out untill the cutoff date it is fairly obvious that there are and will be a large number of issues in what has been released, not on the tools side but on the functional side where there has not been enough time consecrated to tesing the application.

Hopefully we will see an SP2 in the plans soon in order to correct this, or alternatively the 4.1 release being brought forward.

On the technical side we have probably one of the best AOS implementations ever, fortunately as we now no longer have the option of not using the AOS. I have had the opportunity of testing with a farm of AOS servers and a large number of clients and in many instances even shutting down several AOS's many of the client sessions survived. Which given the parallel execution streams that are ongoing is pretty damn impressive, just as a reminder in version 3 and before if an AOS was taken off line all it's sessions died automatically.

On the dev side I have not really used the CLR functionality extensively yet but it looks good.

I will have to continue later, interrupted by an issue with KR2.

/Sven