"Two nights ago we officially signed off on the Beta2 build of Whidbey (build# 50215.45). It was a long time coming (9 months since Beta1!), but hopefully people will find it well worth the wait. Staying focused over such a long time is hard, but our team held up really well and did a super job shipping a high quality release. I’m particularly proud of the folks on my team who run our stress program. They keep a lab of ~1000 machines running 24/7 throughout the year, and delivered a punishing level of stress load on machines looking for hard to find production bugs. We have about 40 different stress variations that we run constantly -- some that do normal web operations (data access, security, output caching, session management, etc), some that do lots of less typical things (lots of compilation changes under load, changing configuration files under load to cause app-domain restarts), and some that do things that are deliberately downright nasty (memory leaks, AV crashes, deadlocks -- where the goal is to ensure that ASP.NET automatically recovers from them). "