Can I sell you a roadmap?

OK, I exaggerate. It'll be free.

Next week, all the R&D team leads and evangelists and we management will (metaphorically) lock ourselves in a Luxor-iant conference room and discuss topics of great import to our company — especially given the state of the economy — and also to nail down what we shall be doing this year. Yes, it's that portion of the great DevExpress annual cycle when I get to write the one post that is guaranteed to generate whoops of delight, sighs of disappointment, or grumblings of discontent from our customers: the roadmap.

This year will be slightly different. You see, over the past month or so, we have been running Project Accepted TBD: an honest evaluation and assessment of all of those suggestions that have been marked as "Accepted - Release TBD", some for, shall we say, quite a while. Some of them have been truly accepted (in which case we'll be deciding which release we'll be putting them in — of significance to the roadmap, of course), some of them have been declined since there is a usable workaround available, usually findable in the knowledgebase; and some of them have been rejected. We're entering the phase where we'll be altering their public status (although it must be said we're still discussing some of them). If you're tracking some of them, you'll be getting notifications.

So, for the releases this year, more than ever before we'll be making great strides in stabilizing and polishing our products as well as in adding new features and functionality. At some point though, it becomes self-defeating to add all these little polished gems to the roadmap — we'd have to ship coffee to everyone to help them to read through it. I do have to say that v2009 vol 1 is already shaping up to be a great release, not necessarily because of several large ticket features, but because of a plethora of small completed items all designed to make your lives easier and more productive. The normally quiet Christmas/New Year period has been very productive for the development teams.

So, the roadmap is upon me, and as usual I will be making every effort to get it out by the end of this month. Stay tuned.

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