Kirk Haselden

We feel your pain...

Friday, I worked for literally hours with a patient and at times humorous customer in the TAP program, Paul Pisarek. It was a bit hilarious on my side actually, as I had multiple meetings and continued to IM and work on the package while sitting in a meeting to discuss SSIS futures for SQL, a meeting to discuss a resolution to the duplicated package IDs when copy/pasting in the designer and multiple ad hoc meetings as people walked into my office. The whole time I was IMing with Paul, moving from office to conference room to conference room with my laptop, bag, mouse, notepad and kitchen sink in my hands.

To make a very long story short, I had written a package for Paul that worked great on my system, but failed miserably for Paul. It turns out that he was seeing a bug that existed in the IDW11 build and I was working on a recent build in which that bug had been fixed. The lesson learned is, do what you can to update to IDW13 when it comes out in a few weeks. We've already fixed many, many bugs that were stumbling blocks. And it will also include a later drop of the Whidbey tools which have fixed issues with the environment.

In the end, we were able to come up with an even better design that worked around the bug. But, I experienced the pain some of you have felt as beta customers and it made me appreciate all the more how incredibly dedicated our beta customers are. We especially appreciate our MVPs and TAP customers that have patiently worked with us to improve the product day in and day out. It's not ready to ship yet, but it's really come a long way in large part because of our beta customers' willingness to push through the issues and report them.

I don't always do this kind of support. In fact, it's quite rare. But I wanted to see the problem all the way through and I wanted to experience a little of what our customers are experiencing. Granted his scenario was a bit unusual and most aren't experiencing this level of pain. But, it was a great experience for me, because I was able to do a real true to life usability test while working through a problem. It was eye opening. Thanks for your patience Paul!

Thanks,

Universe.Earth.Software.Microsoft.SQLServer.IS.KirkHaselden