Hi Guys,
I wanted to give you guys a short overview on 6.3.x as I feel this version has been misunderstood :-).
The first thing that I must say is that we did a mistake with 6.3.x as we connected it to our commercial offering in such an early stage of it's release, although we did try to give you guys a real discount on our retail price so it will make sense buying an unstable version, but cutting back to the technological part which in these post is all I am looking to talk about, 6.3.x is a great version which had a few minor glitches which cause allot of bugs.
This is usually the problem with infrastructural development as a simple glitch can cause multiple bugs. We had allot of reports regarding problems with events not firing and application freezes, which definitely caused us to panic, as the last thing we want is such a version leaving the door. I personally opened an investigation to understand how come we released such a version ready to crucify the developer which caused this issue.
After a short investigation I understood that no crucifixion will be served here as this probably would not be avoided in terms of developer education. What actually happened is a collision of two concepts which are totally separated in their operation but had a connection between them that was never active until we fixed another issue. The two concepts are a mechanism to track the current active form and a mechanism to track the current active window, while these mechanisms sound related there cannot be any two mechanisms so different.
Tracking the active form provides Visual WebGui the ability to emulate WinForms windowing behaviors. For example, when one calls a ‘MessageBox.Show’ or ‘Form.ShowDialog’, one does have to state the owner form which is by default the active form. Allot of other WinForms behaviors are assisted by this ability.
Tracking the active window is a totally different story and serves only one purpose and it is to cope with Internet Explorers weird behaviors in conjunction with modal dialogs. Modal dialogs in Internet Explorer cause allot of undocumented issues, which by tracking the active window and using it for different tasks such as setTimeout or XMLHttpRequest, are solved. So as you might already guessed the active window in inline windows mode and non IE browsers is totally non relevant as the modal issue does not exist.
So returning back to the issue what actually happened is that a single line of code connecting these mechanisms caused tremendous damages in terms of stability. Suddenly operation expecting to work on a window got unexpected objects, those operation failed and where part of the core of Visual WebGui, so hideous bugs like click button not working so the day of light.
Now as I see it the real issue here is QA which as much as we did will never be as extensive as you guys do when you are trying it with all your different scenarios. In the previous development model which should be updated as I see it, we released an unstable version, which was sanity checked only and it took a month or two to be stabilized. As I see it is the same process which 6.3.x is going through, but 6.3.x was to be our first commercial version so you guys expected it to be perfect at the beginning. It is totally understandable and we anticipated it and invested allot of time in QA but as it turns out Visual WebGui is so big that we cannot QA our own framework without the open source development model.
So what we are thinking of doing and would be happy to get feedbacks from you guys, is to provide early releases of our upcoming versions which is equivalent to what is usually called ‘community technology preview’, this will enable you guys to check out our developments and to be prepared in an early stage for later versions and in some cases where you feel that the version is good enough to use it although we will not recommend that. With that we will create a beta testing program which will provide committed developers that will participate in actively checking Visual WebGui. We are still working on the details of this program and we will announce it as soon as we can, where as previews will be released starting very soon.
Regarding 6.3.3+ I feel that we got to a really good place with it and we are committed to have it stabilized in the next few weeks, it is definitely a priority so I encourage you to use it with the promise that every issue will be taken seriously and solved ASAP. Our version development policy is that anything that we broken in 6.3.x is scheduled to stability versions of 6.3.x and issues that were not previously working or where added in 6.3.x but require us to change infrastructure will be scheduled to 6.4.
I will announce our upcoming 6.4 (CTP 1) as soon as it is available for you guys to play with. 6.4 (CTP 1) will include the theme designer and control designer which as I see it should help you guys getting prepared to a new era of designing Visual WebGui applications and further more provide us with feedbacks regarding the needs that you have in terms of customizing the UI.
Cheers,
Guy