In the second week of December we're going to be having our annual development strategy meeting - and I will be doing my best to represent the needs of our VCL customers.  To this end over the next 2 weeks I plan to take as much feedback as you'all can give me about your use of Developer Express VCL components (and those of our competitors if you want), where you consider we have put too much or too little effort, general strategic directions you would like us to consider and even what you feel about the entire Delphi platform.

I plan to collate that information into an internal presentation on the state of our VCL business, and hopefully influence the R&D effort we make over the next 12 months in directions that will better support your own development agendas.

So feel free to email me ( ram@devexpress.com with a subject like "2009 VCL feedback" ) with any private comments.   I promise to reflect every constructive opinion, and the more I get the better I can weight them for relevancy to all our customers - so feel free to encourage other Delphi Developers you know to chip in even if they aren't DX customers.

Thanks in advance ...

I would love to see a VCL equivalent of the XtraCharts suite.

A charting product is a much requested feature, and while we have done the work already for XtraCharts it would be almost a complete rewrite to replicate it in VCL.

My personal feeling on charting in VCL is that the basic TChart shipping in Delphi is good enough for 80% of all requirements (including mine), and the pro TChart fulfils probably 50% of the requirements for the remaining 20%. That would leave 10% of the total market of Delphi Developers for a handful of vendors to fight over, which means sales would be low and therefore unit price would have to be high, blowing out the price of our own VCL subscription - which would be untenable.

Generally speaking this is the problem when Delphi includes a cut down product - it makes it a barren environment for 3rd parties to invest R&D effort in.  Short term it's great for developers (especially if it's a half way decent component like TChart) but long term it's bad for everyone because it kills competition.

We did implement chart views in the Grid for those people who wanted a better master detail solution than linking a TChart to a detail data source.  The chartview itself doesn't have the polish of XtraCharts.  I understand we're constrained to GDI, probably for text speed but it's amazing what a difference anti-aliasing makes to the polish of Chart.

Thanks for the feedback - I think Charts are so far the most requested direction.

Hello Richard,

I have been a DX customer since 2001, and an early adopter of the VCL
subscription service.
There are a few issues I would like to raise

(1) ExpressSpreadSheet
Apart from bug fixes and code changes for IDE compatibility, there have been
little (if any) features added to the component for YEARS
Basic Image support ??
Cell comments ??
Frozen panes (like in quantum grid) ??

(2) Bloat
I also have the .NET Universal subscription. It seems odd to me that in
asp.net, the grid is made to be mean and lean, and
although the QuantumGrid vcl offering is very nice, it is hugh bloatware.
What about also including a lean grid (a la QG3) that we can use in projects
where the data grid is not the main application focus ?
Basic column sorting, grouping and filetring as in your asp.net grid. ...
wouldn't need to be master-detail

(3) Not really interested
If I want to skin an application, there are many dedicated skin libraries
available (e.g. vclSkin)
layout controls - most developers should already have a handle on this stuff
Microsoft look and feel ......................... UGLY................ Do
Delphi developers really see this as a plus ?

(4)Roadmaps
I'd really like to see some proactive customer service here. An email to all
subscribers detailing the roadmap ahead would be nicer than trying to find
it on the website


I doubt my comments will have any great influence on the future of DXVCL
...... I've raised them before and so have others.

Ron

----- Original Message -----
From: Richard Morris (Developer Express
Newsgroups: vcl_products.general
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 2:16 PM
Subject: Influence the development of VCL components

It would be greate to have a Ribbon LookAndFeel kind for buttons, where customized colors can be used, like the lfFlat kind.
Using lfFlat or lfUltraFlat for buttons (TcxButton) looks ugly for me and not up to date.

This suggustion (S130765) was already declined by the team, but I still think it would be great to have a further button style like the glow buttons in the ribbon controls, where different color styles (+glow effect, +gradient) can be used for each button. I don't like skins: It's very slow especially when scolling grids, lot of work creating one styles, and it's not possible to highlight controls with other styles.

 

Hello,

Let's start with that :)

Common controls
- add a hint text that appears inside any edit controls when text was typed
- refresh their looks and feel so that integrates better in Vista or Seven.
- a far better richedit component
- Add a ReadOnly Style
- support Seven new features

CxGrid
- Refresh the user interface : I really like the XtraGrid one which integrates very well in Vista or Seven.
- Add a native "Checkbox" column : the same kind of column avalaible in the Windows Update list that let you choose or not all updates to install... 
- Add row separator as in winform XtraGrid
- Add an layout view as in winform XtraGrid
- Add a carrousel control as in winform XtraGrid
- Add free cell arrangement in Rows as in winform XtraGrid
- Add data paging and scrollin capabilities as in ASP.Net XtraGrid

CxSpellChecker
- add a full Hunspell support
- Provide support for the ISpell hash files  

CxPivotGrid
- Update the user interface : take a look at FastCube their interface is really intuitive

CxScheduler
- Performance improvement for loading recurring events
- Performance improvement for loading huge resources
- multiple resource id 

cxSpreadSheet
- Add Hyperlinks in cells
- Add Excel style comments
- Improve SpreadSheet Fill Speed
- Improve loading Speed
- Internationalization and R1C1-style
- HLOOKUP and VLOOKUP functions are needed 

cxOrgChart
- refresh their looks and feel so that integrates better in Vista or Seven.

cxFlowChart
- refresh their looks and feel so that integrates better in Vista or Seven.

Avaited component suite
- a wizard component suite
- a Gauges component suite

 What I would like to see in the next VCL components:

• Mergeable ribbons
• Multithreaded operations in grids (i.e. sorting)
• Better suppor of nested dataset in grids (client datasets carrying detail data within TDatasetFields)
• An improved docking library framework that lets developing dockable "panels" in their own units
• A Gecko-based "browser" control to avoid IE dependencies in applications

Simple feature will make me customer of DevExpress.

Which is RightToLeft support in your components :-)

Possibility to add pictures from clipboard in RichEdit.

Hi Richard,

Thanks for asking!

Improve the PageControl to include on-tab close buttons, and a plus tab-like button to add a new tab (look at Firefox for an example).

Expressbars (non ribbon) menus and toolbars should support Vista / Seven look and feel.

Expressbars hints should use TcxHintStyleController if available.

Syntax editor with chroma-coding, auto-completion, popup hints etc.

 

John Furlong

 

 

Hi

Charts and Gauges.

Regards.

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The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

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Richard,

Thanks for the chance to provide input on future development.

About 90% of my project work utilises DevExpress components.  The feature set is so good that it's frustrating to have to purchase components from other vendors when pieces of the DevExpress VCL suite are missing or incomplete.

These are the areas that I use other vendors for:

- Charting, Gauges
- Syntax editor
- Complete Rich Text Editor
- Wizard control
- Alert window control (as XtraBars in .NET Winforms library)

It's pleasing to see so many comments on this thread.  Looks like the VCL community is stirring...

Byron Baynham_1:

It's pleasing to see so many comments on this thread.  Looks like the VCL community is stirring...

Sure is - mind you I just invited non-tech to come over and hang ... so it could get noisy and fun in here soon.  I'm looking for high level items like "We need a Charting and Gauges control for Dashboarding" or general complaints (eg: The Quantum-Swiss-Army Grid is bloated) rather than references to items already on our Accepted-TBD list ... but I'll take those too.

I'm getting plenty of emails too - thanks everyone.

Byron Baynham_1:

- Syntax editor

What kind of syntaxes?  Scripting languages?

Mohammed Nasman:

RightToLeft support in your components :-)

I totally agree.  This is a perfect example of a feature request that is one thousand times more critical than the next for less than 1 in 1000 of our customers - which means it is on our list of things we'd like to do but not high enough on that list.  I intend to push for this again (as I have several times in the past) because this is such an important feature for developers who have to produce solutions for most of the middle east.

Ken Randall:

Whilst new things would be nice please, please tackle the vast list of "Accepted - Release TBD" items in the support database!

These are always on our agenda because the status indicates these are items we want to do, but are awaiting a context in which to be able to do them (usually an Infrastructure refresh during a major release).  Thanks for the reminder - I'm going to do some research on how the amount are tracking over time, and maybe develop a metric that gives us insight into how we are fulfilling customer expectations. 

Stephane WIERZBICKI:

CxSpellChecker
- add a full Hunspell support

We're working on a major update of the ExpressSpellingChecker that includes full Hunspell support right now, and I'd love to see that released this year.

Stephane WIERZBICKI:

Avaited component suite
- a wizard component suite

We're doing research into wizards currently.  I can't make any guarantees about this ever becoming a product, but I do expect to see a spike solution from VCL R&D during their presentation at our planning meeting. 

Ron Craven:

I doubt my comments will have any great influence on the future of DXVCL ...... I've raised them before and so have others.

We have a limited R&D budget and have to prioritize requests based on how many developers they will affect, but we always listen. 

I like your idea of a light weight Grid - a developer can't have enough grids, right?

I don't expect a major update of the Spreadsheet.  Expectations are that it should be a drop in replacement for Excel and that implies some features (Macros, Charts, Data) that we just don't have the resources (or the lawyers) to attempt - failing that it's always going to be a niche component, but I do like both your (Rons) and Stephanes feature suggestions.

As for Road Maps ... since you've been a VCL subscriber from the beginning you probably remember how I felt about Road maps when I was CTO from 2002-2006.  My personal opinion remains that as long as we are willing to hold back a product release if it doesn't meet our quality standards (and we are, sometimes permanently), then Road maps are a wishy-washy commitment.  I believe the quality of the updates and releases we have delivered over the previous 12 months are a better guide to someone considering renewing a subscription, and should be our job to make sure that the VCL Subscription remains a compelling renewal for any 12 months period.

After the summit when we have a rough idea of our development agenda for the next 12 months I expect to blog about our the public plans for VCL development for 2010, and I will try to get that into the newsletter which will be emailed out to all customers who get it.

Wizard control can be complemented with a tabbed MDI controller. They both represent a sort of an "application framework" and can share many common features.
And yes, there are many "Accepted - release TBD" items which are still waiting in the queue, some of them really easy to implement (like registering  cxScrollBar in the palette). This list has to be reviewed at last, because some items are more than a few years in this state.