Thank You

It has been a hell of a week. Lots of work on our end to get V4 of 9 stabilized in production and lots of patience on your end while we fixed things that were broken. 

Thank you for bearing with us as we made this deployment and for being so patient we deployed V4 first to all the other communities. We still things to fix and clean up, but we believe we're on a steady path of improvement.If you see something you want improved, have suggestion on how to change the UI text or find a bug, please report it on the Wiki.

The great news, is that with this week behind us and V4 now running on all of our sites, we can evolve so much more rapidly. You'll once again see constant improvements on 9, that the early Niners saw..

Thanks everyone again, you are why we do what we do.
-Jeff

Thanks for the comment Minh... there actually is some reasoning behind it. We consider Channel 9 to be our main or flagship property, and we have a lot of plans for it beyond what you have seen her already. Some of those plans required new features, and some just required more flexibility. It was decided that it would be difficult to build anything new on top of the code that was already running.

Obviously there are some features missing, but we have been working on shipping this site for nearly two years now, and at some point you have to start cutting items off the feature list so that you can ship, and we decided that the core functionality of the site is based around three things: watching videos, commenting on videos and posting in the forums. There are, of course, more things than those three going on with Channel 9, but those three were the ones that we thought we couldn't do without... not even for a few weeks.

None of the missing features that you mention (quoting, going directly to a last post, embedding video) prevented that basic functionality from working, so instead of waiting even longer and preventing us from working on the various new features that we hope to add to Channel 9... we decided to ship once we believed the basic functionality was complete.

Some of the bugs that turned up, didn't turn up when we tested... we did run load tests against the code, in addition to using this exact code in production on several other sites... and it turns out that nearly all of the problems that people saw in the first week after we shipped were tied to performance, and performance was being severely impacted by ongoing app restarts (nearly every couple of minutes). These app restarts didn't happen when we tested, and they didn't happen on the other sites, so we never ran into the rest of the bugs that these restarts ended up producing. Why is that? Well, it is hard to say... we did load testing with an exact set of requests from a recent day on the old channel 9, so the usage pattern should have been the same, but it turns out that in real usage ASP.NET was continually trying to recompile all of our pages, and after 15 recompiles it would automatically recycle the app... all unexpected. And it took us a day or two to find that problem. Anyway, obviously our testing was not complete and comprehensive, but it wasn't from a lack of importance placed on testing, it was merely a mistake that led to some very poor results after roll out.

So... why was it important to ship out Channel 9 when we did, instead of postponing that ship again and again until we reached some mythical level of confidence that it was ready? Our confidence wasn't going to get much higher, and we felt that any issues that turned up would happen quickly and would hopefully be addressed quickly as well. To a certain degree, we also felt that we needed real users to use and comment on the site features... and that we couldn't get that level of participation by just extending the beta period longer. None of us were pleased with how those first few hours and even days went with this release, but that was after waiting two years after we planned to ship C9v4, I doubt waiting another month or two would have made much of a difference. Does that mean that you, the unfortunate user, had to unwillingly help us test... yes, and that is why Jeff is thanking you... for your patience and understanding.

I'd like to thank the Channel 9 users as well, because many of them were very patient and understanding, but I also think that in your case Minh, there is little we could have done that would have left you pleased. If we had shipped with those features included, you would have found something else to complain about... which is fine, every group needs that person who looks for something to complain about, that person who seems continually unhappy... and you seem to have appointed yourself to that role for Channel 9.

We are working hard to address the great feedback we have received over the past days, and it will result in many changes including some new features, but I think that if our goal was to make sure that you were happy with the site, then there would be little point in continuing at all.

Yet here we all are, still posting away.