Re: HotFix 5. My Compliments...

Mark,

thank you for the background.

I can only speak on my own experience that I would rather have Borland / DevCo release hotfixes as they can, then fold them up into service packs along with planned improvements that may not generally be considered something of extreme urgency.

I know that emergencies and ranking of importance is subjective. What is important for a fellow programmer in a .NET Delphi project may not mean anything to me. I can only hope that the best judgment is made by the staff.

Hotfix 5 was something that I think everyone generally appreciates, and as someone who has a lot of 3rd party packages and components, this has drastically improved my productivity and reallocated my blue words to be more towards M$ issues, which I think is more fun to direct towards.

Lance



Mark Edington (Borland) wrote:
Alan Garny wrote:

I really wonder what would be a good reason for not being able to deal with it straight away? You seem to be forgetting that *we*, users, are the one indirectly responsible for keeping Borland in business by paying for their products.

I should probably chime in here and help clear some of this up.

There is actually quite a bit of history surrounding this issue. As you may or may not know, there was an "Update 3" released for Delphi 2005 which was primarily intended to deal with this same issue (unacceptable delays when activating the form designer). The work that was done for that update was centered around the number of components that were installed (not the number of component packages) and addressed inefficiencies in the tool palette refreshing logic. AFAIK, that update was well received and I presumed that it solved the problem.

At the time we shipped Delphi 2006, there were no complaints (that I was aware of) from our field testers regarding the performance of switching between the code editor and form designer. However, once the product started hitting the streets I observed complaints from various users that this old problem was back (here in this forum). At this point I contacted one of the users who was experiencing these delays in an attempt to get the problem figured out. Initially, this was not productive as I was still focusing on the tool palette and the total component count as being the primary culprits.

After further research, I finally isolated the problem as being related to the total number of component packages and not to the number of components themselves. Unfortunately, this discovery didn't occur until we were already locking down the second update in preparation for release. So, to make a long story short, that is how this ended up being released as a hotfix.

It's also worth pointing out that this problem affects only a very small percentage of users. There is no way for me to know for sure, but my best guestimation is that it's less than 2%. Had the problem been more systemic, and aggravating a larger percentage of the user base, I would have made a bigger push to get it out sooner. It's in a fairly core area of the product, so I wanted to get as much informal field testing as possible before releasing it to the public.


So, if we are not happy with them, we may end up going elsewhere. I have seriously considered doing that in the last few years, but like lots of 'old' Borlandders, I decided to keep giving Borland another chance and another, etc. It would seem that it's finally paying off, but again like many users, I had in the last few years to cope with what I would consider being non-finished products.

I appreciate you giving us the second chance. I also recognize that without paying customers we wouldn't be in business long. I'm not going to go into a discussion about the decision making process for when our products ship. Suffice it to say that I think everyone recognizes that the products we have released in recent years could have benefited from additional baking time, but at the end of the day we are a business and if we don't ship products we can't pay the bills.

Your feedback about this matter is welcome, and to the extent to which it is in my power to improve the product on behalf of the community I'm going to do that. If you are seriously considering jumping ship I invite you contact me directly and let me know why.

I'm glad that "Hotfix #5" has attracted attention and generated excitement. If it's what the people want there will be more!

Mark


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