The bug stops here!

The bug stops here!

There will always be bugs. My bug list is growing, and I’m a bit concerned about the latest issues to show up with C++ environments. Here is what we are doing to address these issues and when.

C++

It appears there are several issues with the latest builds in C++. Itis going to take longer than I’d like to address these, but be assuredthat C++ is just as important to us as Delphi. These are currently one of the highest priority items we have besides Tiburon.

No Excuses

Customers just want things to work, you don’t want excuses. I fully understand that, I’ve been in your shoes and constantly am as a user of other companies software products. So what I am presenting here I present not to provide excuses, but to be very upfront with you and give you an idea of when they will be fixed.

Lots of Delphi

As many of you know, I just started back at Atozed on July 1. There was a lot for me to do including getting set up for developing, familiarizing with the latest source code, and more. I now have a development machine set up with Delphi 7. Why do I use Delphi 7? Well because since we have to support back to Delphi 5 I cannot use new language features etc. Delphi 7 is lightening fast, so while I will need to do testing in many versions of Delphi, Delphi 7 is where I will spend most of my time.

I also need to obtain copies of Delphi 5, 6, 2005, 2006, 2007, C++ Builder 5, and C++ Builder 6. Then I need to install each of them in virtual machines for testing of installation bugs and the occasional version specific issue. As you can imagine, that takes just a bit of time.

Tiburon

And then there is Tiburon, the next upcoming version of Delphi. I will write more about what I think of Tiburon soon on my personal blog at Kudzu World. In short, since Delphi 7 I simply have not been that interested in the features that have been added to Delphi. I also know that many Delphi users feel the same simply by looking at the number of users in our user base who are using Delphi 6 and 7. Tiburon in my opinion finally is implementing really interesting features and setting up groundwork for more in the future. Unicode and Generics are just two items of great interest to me.

I am not at liberty to say when Tiburon is coming, but IntraWeb is a big part of Tiburon. For the next few weeks integration and testing with Tiburon is going to consume a lot of our resources. The changes for Unicode are necessary, but are not small changes and require a lot of testing. We cannot simply port IntraWeb to Tiburon and forget pre-Tiburon users as many of you can. We still support back to Delphi 5 so in addition to making IntraWeb work with Unicode, we have to make sure the source still works in previous Delphi versions as well.

Solutions

I am currently collecting issues and prioritizing them. I am also looking for new staff. Matthijs has been brought on during his summer break and I am working with some other candidates now to see if they can get up to speed and fill the role.

We need a few weeks though, especially with Tiburon in progress. I thank you for your patience and understanding and promise you that we take all of your issues seriously.