The provenance of the word show-stopper dates back to the music hall days when a performer’s act was so good that the show was quite literally brought to a stop by the audience’s applause. Of course, time moves on and the word has taken on an altogether more sinister meaning, with it now conjuring up the idea of a fault so catastrophic as to bring the use of something, or the sale of something, to a premature end. A good example of this is the Millennium Bridge, the most recent bridge to be built across the Thames in London.
The Millennium Bridge is a foot bridge crossing the Thames at St. Paul’s. It opened on June 10 2000. Now every structure has a resonance frequency, a frequency at which it will oscillate at maximum amplitude. Unfortunately for the Millennium Bridge, it’s resonance frequency was close to the natural footfall of the average person, not good on a foot bridge! The result was that when people walked on it, it swayed, as it swayed people naturally fell instep with the swaying motion, which amplified the swaying motion and so and and so forth in a feedback loop. Before long the bridge was swaying wildly and it was finally closed to the public on June 12 2000 to enable remedial engineering work to be carried out. A true show-stopper in the modern sense of the word.
Of course we are more familiar with the term show-stopper to mean a fault, or a series of faults, that render a software product unusable. The most stark example of this at the moment is probably Microsoft’s Vista operating system. When Vista shipped it received some bad press and in this age of the blogsphere echo chamber that negative press was passed on and amplified, to the point now where users who have never seen, let alone installed, Vista think it is a terrible product and will quite happily tell anyone who will listen all about it’s failings and short comings. This negative impression of Vista could become, not so much a show-stopper, but something which could seriously retard the sales of Vista.
It’s hard to get out from underneath the snowball of such negativity, fueled as it is by the echoing nature of the blogsphere, but Microsoft have attempted to do just that with Project Mojave. In this experiment a number of people, who had a pre-existing negative view of Vista, were shown a “new” operating system called Mojave. They all thought the new operating system was amazing and wanted to know when they could upgrade to it; only then were they told that they had, in fact, just been shown Vista. Whether initiatives like this are enough to combat the negativity surrounding Vista remain to be seen, but it is certainly a good start.
To a certain extent we suffer a similar problem with XAF, not around the quality of the product, everyone I show it to loves it, but there is a perception that XAF has a steep learning curve, and that learning curve is putting people off taking up the framework. Well guess what, those people are not wrong, they are just not completely right. Now XAF has a learning curve, there is no doubt about that, however it is worth noting that every framework, which increases developer productivity, is going to have a learning curve and the more a framework does for you, the more productive you are, the more there is going to be to learn.
So, now that we have established that there is no getting away from the learning curves associate with an application framework, what are DevExpress doing to help? Well we are tackling the problem on a number of fronts. Firstly, there is the documentation, then there are the videos and lastly, but I hope not least, there are evangelists like me. If you have an issue regarding not being able to work out how the framework works in a particular area, then please feel free to get in touch with me at garysATdevexpressDOTcom. Trust me, the view from the top is worth the effort. :-)