DevExpress VCL v15.1: the old spreadsheet has gone

One of the breaking changes we neglected to mention with the release of DevExpress VCL v15.1 yesterday is that the old spreadsheet control, deprecated when we released the new spreadsheet control a year ago, has been completely removed from the install. If you still are using that control, you will have to reinstall v14.2 and continue to use that until you migrate your apps to use the new control.

Our assumption was that since the new control was vastly superior to the old – there’s really no contest – our customers needing a spreadsheet would have spent some time over the past year to migrate to the better one. It seems that we were overly optimistic in that regard, so I apologize on behalf of the team and the company to all those customers who installed v15.1 only to be surprised by the sudden disappearance. Of course, I was positive I had mentioned it in a previous blog post, but alas it appears I was wrong there too (for proof, see the picture of my chair): I can find no mention of our timetable to remove the older control after a year of being deprecated. Again, please accept my apologies. We let you down badly.

My takeout from this is that we have to become a lot better at revealing such large breaking changes well in advance, so that you, our customers, are inconvenienced as little as possible, or at least have enough time to lay down some plans for the inevitable change. Stay tuned to my section here on the DevExpress Community site: I’ll be talking to the team about any such major changes planned for the next 12 months and I will be reporting back in a future blog post.

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