This evening at the Partner Expo Reception (free food! free
drinks!) I got taken aside by a customer who'd been using
XtraReports for a good couple of years — in fact as long
as I've been working here: I wonder if there's a connection?
— and proceeded to, er, give me some feedback.
Believe it or not, it's this kind of thing that I so
enjoy about conferences. Take one customer who is passionate
about one of your products, knows it very well, and is
prepared to provide a well-reasoned and persuasive argument
for why we should be doing something that we're not, and
you've got the recipe for a stimulating conversation and the
possibility of some real change.
This is what happened half way through the evening. I was
doing a demo of our soon-to-be-beta DXGrid for WPF and one of
the guys watching asked to have a chat about XtraReports
afterwards.
Quick synopsis of his situation: his company generates reports
of some variety for a whole slew of customers, kind of like a
batch system. The reports are huge, many pages, with subreports
in subreports, ad nauseam but possibly not ad infinitum.
Happens weekly and monthly. Used to use a Certain Reports
product and is glad that they made the move. Loves
XtraReports.
Right away he's different then from the majority of our
XtraReports customers in that he's generating lots of large
complicated reports at once. Different, certainly, but not
overwhelmingly so.
He had two main issues:
- The install size. Our install program for DXperience is now
150Mb or so. For someone who only has one or two suites (like
XtraReports), this is an inordinately big download. He was
wondering whether there was anything we could do. I must admit
I was stung a little bit by this on Sunday before I came here:
we released v2008 vol.1.4 on Saturday morning and so my Sunday
was spent in downloading the latest version, uninstalling the
previous, installing the new, and making sure that everything
was working properly.
We talked a bit about the issues. He liked the frequency of
the minor updates (as do I), so didn't want to reduce the rate
of releases at all. It was essentially the size: could we
split it up into Suites, use some kind of patching technology,
download as we installed?
The breaking it up into Suites is possible, I suppose. The
patching is a no win situation since we enable updating from
any previous version, and so the patch file would be larger
than a full install. But the download as we install stuff
sounds interesting and is something we should possibly look
into. (In essence it breaks the two-step big download followed
by big install into a single step do everything at the same
time. Mostly the same amount of time, but perhaps a better
user experience.) We'll look into it.
- The other issue was memory usage. Because of the way he's
set up the reports, he suffers from high memory usage
especially if we have a slight bug where we're not necessarily
cleaning up our subreports in a timely fashion. I'm going to
get the team to take another look at this issue.
The most interesting thing about this conversation was I think
the level of passion on both sides. He was passionate about
XtraReports and loved to use the product. It was generating
good revenue for his company. I was passionate about
XtraReports too, from a different viewpoint obviously, and
want to make it better. Between the two of us, we came to a
consensus, and it's now up to me to see if we can't do
something about it.
Gotta love booth work!
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