... Just curious 
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8 comments
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Patience, young Jedi...
Just kidding. We are experiencing some technical difficulties and it might be a couple more weeks. Sorry about that.
Tilman -
Sorry to be a pain, is there an update on progress?
Cheers -
Looks like they're delayed some more. I hope this means a better product with a lot of the enhancements we mentioned during the beta test phase, and hopefully really really heavily tested (although not giving it to us means it can't be as rigorous as it should be -- just a hint, Red Gate
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Hello everyone,
Thanks for your comments. I think it's probably about time for an update from me as I've been silent for quite a while whilst focussing on the technical issues, and have left Tilman to look after the forum.
The deal is basically this, and I almost can't emphasise this enough: SQL intellisense is a hard hard problem, and it's taken us longer to come up with a decent solution than we originally thought. That's the bottom line. Remember that Microsoft gave up on this for SQL Server 2005, and also that they won't be shipping it with version 1 of Data Dude (and they're not the only company who either run into serious problems, or given up entirely), and having got most of the way through this project I can definitely see why. It's tricky. Much trickier than providing intellisense for something like C# or Java could ever be. And there are times when I've wondered whether or not we'd actually be able to pull this off.
Don't get me wrong, I *am* sorry it's taken us longer than we anticipated, but we're not going to ship it until it's ready. I'm also sorry for all those people who purchased on the pre-release special offer back in July (?) and August. It's generally acknowledged within Red Gate that offering the product for preorder before it was actually clear whether or not we'd be able to ship it on time was a mistake, but it's not a mistake we'll be making again. I could quite literally lose sleep if I thought too much about the amount we've sold on preorder over the past few months. I wince every time we get an update in a company meeting. If we were able to redo all of this I'd definitely be kicking up a fuss if anybody suggested we should do a pre-relase offer before... well, before about now actually. And as I said in one of my blog posts, there's not too much that's more demoralising for a project team than a deadline that seems to keep moving further away, but this is software and sometimes even with the best will in the world that sometimes happens.
A few comments about the beta. We've had a lot of flack over it, some of which is fair. However, the point of the beta for us, which I've always maintained, was to try out some slightly risky ideas. When we originally discussed it internally we acknowledged that it wasn't going to be a standard Red Gate beta, and that this might cause us some headaches. On the other hand there were general rumblings of discontent around the office about how we make far too much of a big deal (internally) about betas which creates a significant overhead and a lot of pressure and stress on the project team. I think if we were to do this again I'd perhaps do things slightly differently, based on the fact that what we've been working on is basically a 6 month project rather than the originally envisaged 3 - 4 month project, however I'd still want to run the beta as early as possible.
As far as features go we weren't sure how the candidate list would be received because, relatively speaking, it's covered in widgets and doodads that you don't normally see on an intellisense pop up. That seemed to go down fairly well though, and we've obviously made some refinements to it since then.
The other thing we wanted to know about was the automatic FROM clause generation, which based on the feedback we received has gone away for SQL Prompt 3. I'm not saying it's never coming back, but I am saying we ditched it for this release, along with a few other clever ideas, and have gone back to focussing on the basics, because doing too much just annoyed far too many people, so now what we have is something much more solid.
The thing I've certainly learned from all this is that with intellisense there's a very fine line between not enough assistance and too much assistance. So everything's simpler now, and whilst you can do some things (e.g. qualifying) automatically, the tool no longer bites you in the backside if you try to do it manually (and of course, that actually works as expected).
I think the beta was most important for us in that it allowed us to try things out and find that people weren't so keen on them early on before we'd wasted too much time polishing them, and then when they didn't work out so well... well we just stopped working on them and moved on rather than messing around for another month before doing the beta. It was never meant for us to duplicate the functionality of SQL Prompt 2 at that stage, although those of you who use version 2 will be pleased to note that features like auto-capitalise/auto-lower case, and wildcard expansion are back and working much better than they did in version 2.
Anyway, I'd better get back to actually doing some work. I may post something along the lines of the above on my blog later if I get the chance (and probably a shorter version at that - this is a bit long), but I wanted to give you guys an update since you've helped us so much with the beta. At some point nearer the release date I'll also make an announcement about the promised free copies of SQL Prompt 3.
In the meantime please don't give Tilman too much aggro: he's no use to us as a gibbering wreck.
Bye for now,
Bart -
Sounds good, Bart. Good luck w/ completing this thing, and I hope to see you next week at PASS?
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Haha, I wish. It would have been good, but I decided to bail out of it two or three weeks back in order to get SQL Prompt out sooner. Hopefully I'll be there next year. Hope it's a great week.
Cheers,
Bart -
Thanks for that update, appreciate you taking some time out to write that.
And personally i think the main idea of intellisense is to be productive but for you to forget it's there.
It has to not take over so much that it becomes annoying and a hindrance, but do enough so it is productive and that is the fine line you spoke about.
Look forward to seeing the RC when it becomes available. -
No problem. I think that's bang on: you have to help people be productive without being intrusive or annoying. We are getting there though and I'll post again sooner to the RC release date.
Thanks,
Bart
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