Today marks another milestone in the upcoming Hadron release of DotNetNuke.   For the first time ever, DotNetNuke is offering a Community Technology Preview that will allow you to begin testing the latest version long before we have completed all the features.  As I discussed last week, the CTP is not intended to be production ready software but is an opportunity for the community to get a chance to start kicking the tires.  The CTP is an important milestone as it will allow us to gather feedback from the community much earlier in the release cycle and thereby allow us more time to incorporate that feedback into the final release.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Sometimes a name is everything.  It can convey meaning and emotion.  In the world of software, a name can convey the stability or instability of a release.  The name, or label, that we apply to a release is our way of communicating to you some important information about our product.

Next week, for the first time since DotNetNuke was created, we will be releasing a Community Technology Preview (CTP).  This CTP will be for the upcoming DotNetNuke 6.0 release.  Later this spring we will release another CTP, a Beta or two and a Release Candidate (RC).

Each of these terms (CTP, Beta, RC) represents a specific milestone in our release process and it is important to understand the distinction to know what you can expect in each release.  Most developers in the Microsoft ecosystem will understand the terminology, but this post is intended to be a refresher so that as we discuss these releases in our community everyone will know what we are talking about.  Our definitions may be slightly different than the way it is used by other companies and that is ok, as long as we are consistent in our usage.