After nearly 7 months, the finish line is finally in sight. With the final touches applied to the product over the past few weeks, we are confident that we are on track for an exciting new product release.
As a bit of a refresher on the release terminology that we use in the DotNetNuke community, I would encourage you to read the blog written by Joe Brinkman last year titled "What's In A Name?". The blog explains that by the time we hit a Release Candidate, the product is pretty much frozen. We have gone through all the major test scenarios and are just running through a final set of regression tests and verifying the packaging. In the absence of any major show-stopping bugs, this is the product which will be released. At this point we only have a week or two until the anticipated release date and are really just taking one last look before we release the product. Any issue found at this stage will likely just be logged in Gemini and be scheduled for correction in a follow on maintenance release.
The response from the community to the CTP and BETA releases for 6.2 has been very positive. There is a lot of excitement about the new Social functionality and we expect it will provide the foundation for a lot of innovative new community sites and platform extensions. And although new features are great, we also wanted to ensure that this release meets our very high standards for quality and at this point we believe we have achieved that goal as well.
I am sure that many of you are familiar with Joel Splosky's quote “Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.”. So although there is often a desire to spend additional time polishing and tweaking the product to make it "perfect", there comes a time when you need to put the software into the hands of your users and customers.
So with that in mind, we are pleased to announce the public release of the DotNetNuke 6.2 Release Candidate. You can download the release from our project page on Codeplex. Please take the time to put the product through its paces. Barring any unexpected critical issues, we will be releasing the final DotNetNuke 6.2 package by the end of the month. If you find a bug, please log it in Gemini. If it is a bug which prevents a mainline use case from functioning and for which there is no work-around ( ie. a “show-stopper” ), please make sure you escalate it through the standard channels as soon as possible.
As is typically the case for RC releases, this package is not a formal release and is NOT recommended for production use. There is no guarantee that there will be an upgrade path to the final release package should we need to do another build.