Well, I checked back here hoping to find the Hotfixes that have been promised for so, so long.
What I found were more disappointments. Our company owner has already asked me to remove the Infragistics components from our current project because he's frustrated that there is no professional product maintenance oversight at IG. I was hoping to find a hotfix here and save ourselves some work, but I should have known better.
Vincent, here are some personal observations from another software development manager:
1) These delays make IG look extraordinarily unprofessional. Responsible developers stick to their promises and add additional resources, if necessary, to get the job done ON TIME. (That's what we're now doing after being delayed for WEEKS waiting for deliveries promised by IG that never materialized.)
2) IF a software engineer that I supervise ever came to me on the day that he was to have delivered a project element to tell me that he had encountered a "major technical issue" and this was the FIRST that I had heard about it, I would strongly suspect that he was lying to me about why he had missed his commitment. "Major" issues generally don't manifest in the last WEEK before delivery of a complex project. This kind of "issue" tells your customers (also in the development business) that you're not nearly as far along as you should be (e.g. you're not applying the necessary attention, and consequently not the necessary resources, to the project.
3) IG needs to prioritize product maintenance over new development work. Why? Because products in the field represent commitments that IG has already made and for which IG has already been paid. The product representation is that it comes with maintenance and support. The reasonable legal presumption is that the maintenance and support are reasonably provided (that is, they don't preclude constructive work with the product). IG's maintenance of our purchase has put our use of the components we purchased from you at a DEAD STOP. Note: This isn't a warranty issue. This is a product representation issue.
Again, I URGE STRENUOUSLY that IG adopts and adheres to a professionally managed, reasonable, achievable timeframe for the development and release of product maintenance hotfixes.
Jason LockridgeSenior ProgrammerSmithSystems, Inc.Los Angeles, CA
According to Ayoola Ogunsola we should expect 9 hotifixes per year except the month before a product release.
There is little need for me to reiterate what Jason has so eloquently explained. I have been a user of Infragistics products since the early Sheridan Systems days. Support in terms of actual product fixes does not seem to be improving. Indeed the communication of delays has improved and participation in the forums by Infragistics employess has improved, but the most important aspect simply has not been addressed - namely delivery of either A) Code that doesn't need hotfixes OR B) timely and frequent hotfixes to resolve problems.
From my perspective it seems Infragistics is marketing an ever growing range of products with insufficient resources to ensure that the products are adequately supported / debugged. In the world of small developers, we simply don't have the luxury of spending countless hours cutting out small chunks of our large applications to provide working demos of IG bugs. Further, we cannot justify our delays delivering to clients based on problems that one of our vendors has. We (and other IG users) experienced a similar catastrophe last year with 2007.1.
In all the discussion to date, IG has yet to offer any kind of compensation in recognition of the cost to your users (IE: us) of these continuing bugs / hotfix delays. I suggest IG considers something beyond "sorry for the delay", "we plan to have 9 hotfixes per year" and so on and pony up something concrete in recognition of the pain we endure.
As it stands at the moment Ayoola Ogunsola cannot / has not provided any date of when the hotfix will be delivered. It sounds like its simply going to arrive with 2008.2.
I'm sure you are doing your best Vince, but we have been hearing about planned improvements to code quality / hotfixes for several years and 2008 seems to be much the same as 2006 and 2007.
Scott HardingTimeslice Technologies Corp.
Jason,Please see this post from Ayoola Ogunsola, our Director of Quality and Release Engineering, for more information on this hot fix.