Hi,
it seems that for the past two releases you added virtually nothing of value for WPF developers. Is there still any meaningful development going on? I see very little reason for continuing my subscription in 2018 at the moment.
Best regards,
Florian
You must have missed our latest 17.2 WPF release blog.
https://www.infragistics.com/community/blogs/infragistics/archive/2017/11/14/what-39-s-new-in-17-2-ultimate-ui-for-wpf.aspx
We are constantly adding value to our WPF product. It's just that some features and controls take longer to write than others. We have a very full backlog for 18.1 as well, such as adding merged cells to the xamDataGrid, new excel features such as conditional formatting, comment support, filtering and sorting tables, and much more. We are also doing a lot of technical debt. You may not see the direct results from this effort, but it helps us provide better quality code and better support. We are also moving towards a continuous delivery process in which we hope to provide features to you as soon as they are complete and you no longer have to wait 6 months for that feature or new control you want.
The WPF product is a very mature product. We are at the point where we will be focusing on those large and time consuming tasks that we haven't tried to implement in the past because we were implementing smaller features as such a fast pace.
What would you define as "meaningful development"? What types of things would you like to see us working on to give you reason to continue renewing your subscription?
Hi Brian,
thanks for your reply!
But no, I have not missed your blog. If you read the post, you'll notice there's basically nothing in it except for a few charting related features. 17.1 was similar.
> We have a very full backlog for 18.1 as well
Would be nice if you could communicate future plans with your customers. Because...
> What would you define as "meaningful development"?
...I would have referred to your UserVoice portal, but it seems to be gone? At least the WPF specific feature requests no no longer seem to exist.
> What types of things would you like to see us working on to give you reason to continue renewing your subscription?
I won't make renewal depend on specific feature requests of course. But at least I would like to get the impression that my wishes my be addressed at some point, which is not the case if charting is the only area that is being worked on.
My personal desires currently are a proper modern theme for the XamDockManager (your Office 2013 theme looks somewhat terrible) and virtualization for the xamDataGrid with variable row heights. Also, scrolling to a particular point of time in xamSchedule would be helpful (I have to rely on a workaround currently).
I think you are underestimating how much work went into those "few charting related features". We shipped two brand new charts controls with very intelligent data adapters to automatically interpret the data. We also shipped a brand new theme, and you must have completely missed the awesome new Control Configurators for 5 of our controls. That was a massive effort our team shipped within a short period of time. Keep in mind the very short amount of time in-between our releases.
These plans were just completed last week, so you are actually the first to hear it. We don't do roadmaps as we like to be more agile in how we respond to our market and customer needs. The second we provide a roadmap, it's ourtdated.
Yes, we cancelled our account with UserVoice for various reasons. We are working on a new product ideas site right now. All the ideas from the old UV account will be copied over.
Like I said, we are making a ton of investments in new areas, such as productivity, and not just charting. I would like to overhaul our dock manager to be more inline with the current VS2017 implementation, but that is such a massive effort, and we have to balance that against our other 1000's of items to do. The xamDataGrid variable row height most likely won't make it in. I agree that scrolling a point of time in the schedule would be helpful, but once again, we have a massive number of requests and each one must be prioritized and balanced against a number of variables.
If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out to me by email (blagunas@infragistics.com) so I can address your questions, comments, and concerns.