First, let me say that, in general, I'm quite happy with my NetAdvantage products and the responsiveness of the people at Infragistics. Your's were the best controls (for what I wanted anyway) that I could find when I tested a bunch of different UI products.
I've just spent the first 3 (Three) hours of my morning doing nothing but debugging and documenting for Infragistics some additional information regarding a current bug issue that I found and reported in the first place. Discovering and working around this particular bug has taken most of my time for the previous couple of days. Another bug I discovered and reported which is also now in the Infragistic bug Case todo list, took me a couple hours to diagnose and report.
I bill my time at over $100/hour, which I realize is not terribly extravagant as programming goes, but, it still adds up after a coupl'a days... I personally, have a hard time billing my customers for time that was spent on finding, diagnosing, and working around bugs in the software that "I" purchased and use. On the other hand, I suspect Infragistics probably isn't going to pay me my normal billing rate for finding, diagnosing, and reporting thier bugs to them... even tho they probably should.
So I was thinking... Infragistics should start giving us a credit for each legitimate bug we find, diagnose, and report. The credit would go against the purchase of New Products or our next Annual Maintenance Fee, or whatever you call that charge. I don't know what a fair price per bug would be, but I do know that working as one of Infragistics Testing and Quality Control people for FREE after paying over $1,000 to purchase the products in the first place, (while it's a helluva deal for Infragistics) ain't quite right...
$50 bucks per bug? Whad'ya think?
By the way, the "Email me replies to this post" doesn't work for me. I never get emailed the replies. Does it work for anyone else?
Hi Guys,
First, let me say that I am sorry about the issues. It is not fun to spend time on a problem only to realize there was nothing you could do about it in the first place because of a bug in our software. I can't commit to anything around a bug-swap right now, but I can start a discussion here at Infragistics on the frustrations you guys have had and where we can do better.
One of the drivers to shift from 3 releases a year to 2 releases a year was to give us back a lot of the time we spent prepping releases so we could do more around quality assurance. This change in our engineering process also allowed us to release CTP’s at a more regular schedule. Our goal around the CTP releases is to give you time to look at what we are doing and to give us feedback around scenarios that we might be missing before we release.
I realize that everybody does not have time to experiment with CTP releases, but any feedback (good and bad) we can get is positive for the product. In fact, as much specific feedback we can get on the scenarios your are using for the controls gives us the opportunity to test those scenarios before the product gets released. So don’t be shy on telling us where you want us to spend more time even if you aren’t using any of the CTP’s.
This might not be the perfect answer that you wanted, but improving the quality in our software, documentation, and technical support is our main focus. I’ll also take a look at the bugs you guys reported and see what is going on with them as well and let you know the deal there.Please keep me posted on any other issues you are having as well,
Thanks
Jason
Wolven,
I totally agree with you.So do I founded, and resolved, Infragistics Bugs and spent a lot of time to discover it and to try to transofrm my SupportRequest in a BugCase bug with the "first-line" Support Engenieer (but this guys have nevere written an applications or written only examples?), even I told the line number of their source code and the relative correction XD .
The pepople at Infragsitcs do their work good, but they dont write real applications and of course they dont crash with a real deep use of their superb abstractions (NetAdavantage).
I support your suggestion to "win" a copules of bucks for any real bug discovered and use them like a discount coupon to buy from Infragstics. I also think that if the CEO of Infragistics follow your suggestion he do a great thing.We wait any reply from Infragistics.
Ciao.
Davide Dolla.
I totally agree, I've just spent a day rebuilding my Visual Studio toolbox because the infragistics update command trashed them. The support guy only wants to know if I managed to add the manually nothing about helping restore the damage caused.