Vista OS

[Lynn Fredricks]

> >Right now we test with several operating systems and some like Vista 
> >will get a lot more love in the future.
> 
> The "future" is rather ambiguous.  Vista is here now.  It's 
> one thing for a hobbyist supporting a few academics for free 
> to go blindly into the future, but not recommended for 
> commercial developers.

That's right - we are officially supporting it. Its been tested on Vista by
both of our development teams in Ukraine and Germany.

> In my opinion, it is just plain irresponsible to imply that 
> REAL is the culprit here if Paradigma hasn't tested with 
> Vista.  True, REAL should have an interest in making sure 
> that plugins work, but your interest in that should outweigh 
> REAL's.  Furthermore, how should REAL test your plugin?  Just 
> as I don't expect Paradigma to fix anything I can't reproduce 
> for them, how would REAL know what to look for?  Paradigma 
> maintains a test bed of thousands of conditions.  It could be 
> just one that is causing a problem on Vista.

Im going by what was reported to us by other developers as a possible
culprit here - one that Ive heard again and again. If you are only using
Valentina then that eliminates plugin conflict from the picture in your
case. I didn't imply anything. This is a simple matter of eliminating what
might be causing the problem.

I cant speak to REAL's testing methods, but if I were they, Id collect the
top 5-10 third party plugins and get them into the loop. Ive had experience
selling 'extensible' tools of the non-developer type too and, often a
solution provider needs a plugin to work more than getting the next upgrade
of the host.

You've reminded me of a funny experience I had in the earlish 90's when I
was international sales manager at Now Software. Now used to sell a
wonderful package of utilities, some of which were bundled with their
consumer Macs. When Apple would get a crashing tech support call of a
certain stripe, they'd ask if Now Utilities was installed (or dtermine if
it's a mac that had one of the OEM'd ones) and have the customer do a quick
test with the extensions turned off. Since NU patched the operating system
you can see how this could be a problem with each upgrade. Yet many
customers were irritated because, turning off the NU meant a loss of some
really productive features. Apple loved the NU bundle but their tech support
guys did not.

Best regards,

Lynn Fredricks
President
Paradigma Software
http://www.paradigmasoft.com

Valentina SQL Server: The Ultra-fast, Royalty Free Database Server