As you may guess/hope, we're doing our best to close down Whidbey Beta 2 ... so that we can ship it out to you to use. As part of that, we recently completed a security push to ensure that we are shipping a secure product. Another product axis that we also strive to deliver upon is compatibility. We have a set of processes and tools for ensuring that Whidbey is backwards compatible, to ensure that assemblies compiled against the v1.0 or v1.1 .NET Framework execute without issue on the v2.0 (Whidbey) .NET Framework.

You can help too, to ensure that we are delivering on compatibility in Whidbey. First, check out my colleague Jesse's posting @ GotDotNet that allows you to easily do compatibility testing against Whidbey Beta 1.

If you do find a problem, compatibility issue or otherwise, tell us about it @ the MSDN Product Feedback Center. We get this feedback delivered directly into our bug database and we deal with this feedback alongside the regular bugs that we get from our testing teams. Here is an example of a user-reported bug that we fixed that happened to be a compatibility-break.

I also plan to do a series on compatibility here to provide more transparent information on our compatibility bar and story.

One last thing ... here is our existing .NET Framework compatibility site. Jesse and I are planning on building a new site that is easier to use. I would have built it against Whidbey Beta 2, but he suggested that we build it against Everett/SQL 2000 and then host it on Whidbey/Yukon to dogfood Whidbey and Yukon compatibility. So, that's what we're doing. Cool, eh?