But your Columns UI is working with 0.9. So you are the only one who has the SDK?

Wouldn't it be better to have everything ready and tested with 0.9 final? There might be bugs in the 0.9 SDK, I think developers should have the ability to test it.

Anyway, I'll probably have to wait. I hope this is the last RC before final Everything works perfectly for me so far. Except of almost all plugins :-(.

Columns UI is musicmusic's component.
During the beta cycle, Peter made the SDK available to the HA staff associated with foobar2000 (which basically means kode54 and me) and musicmusic who was chosen because he has been consistenly active as a component developer for quite a long time, so a good working knowledge of the SDK can be assumed. Plus Columns UI is a fairly popular component, so it was expected that more people would actually test the betas, if it was available.

While I do not believe the SDK to be bug-free due to common knowledge about software development, the result with previous beta cycles has shown the following:

• When beta X is released, people are still using (and reporting bugs from) beta X-3, because the author of one of their components has not yet updated said component.
• A huge number of problems were reported, but it was quite hard to sort out which ones are actually caused by foobar2000 itself (i.e. interesting for us).
• The majority of problems in combination with third-party components was caused by those components. Reason for this include that many third-party developers lack familiarity with the SDK and documentation in the SDK was rather scarce.

The problems with the SDK that can be revealed after release are

• design limitations
• bugs in utility code

While design limitations cannot be overcome without a new version of foobar2000, bugs in utility code can be fixed by updating the SDK and recompiling all affected components. We certainly do not have every imaginable component for 0.9 right now, but there is sufficient diversity to provide a good coverage of the SDK.

Hi foosion,

Thank you for that very logical explanation. I often wondered why the new SDK was withheld from developers. Now it makes perfect, logical sense why it was done, at least for me, anyway. ;-) Knowledge is such a wonderful thing! :-)