Data Abstract for .NET

Hi.

it’s been a while since the last post here, and a lot has been happening here at RemObjects.

We released Chrome 1.5, and don’t let the version number fool you, 1.5 is a major new version, with exciting new features across the board, from the language itself to the IDE. I can hardly believe it has already been over a month, and the Chrome team has already been busy preparing for a updated version 1.5.3 to come in late january, before we go into “deep r&d” mode for Joyride.

Also, and even more excitingly, today we have finally launched Data Abstract for .NET. A lot of work has gone into this product over the past half year (and that’s the main reason things have been so quiet here the past few months), andt i think it has been wel worth the wait. DA/.NET has turned out to be a very solid and powerful product, and we’re excited to finally unleash it onto the general public. And the version available today is just the beginning – we have more features in the queue to be added to updated releases over the next few months; some of which i’ll be talking about more in the blogs here soon, some i won’t ;).

As if that weren’t enough, there’s more happening. As some of you might have noticed, we have recently updated our ROadmap and removed that the image with the scheduled release dates for upcoming projects.

The reason for this is that we’ve vastly restructured the way we’re aproaching the development cycle and project management when we started DA/.NET, giving the development process more structure and better control. Of course project management here at RO has always evolved over the time, from our first RO1/Delphi, over DA, RO3/Delphi, RO/.NET, Chrome, and now DA/.NET. And as the company grows, the products get more complex and elaborate and more and more customers rely on us delivering stable and reliable software, methodologies need to be fine-tuned and expanded.

As part of that, we have drafted very detailed development plans for the four “ROFX” products (RemObjects SDK and Data Abstract, both for Delphi and .NET), plans that we are intending to share with our customers in detail, once we have all the i’s crossed and t’s dotted.

While at first sight this might just sound like a convenient excuse for delaying the product releases, this is actually good news for you, our customers. We believe that the upcoming round of version 4.0 products will be the most solid and robust, yet. Also, when the new ROadmap will be published in january, we will commit to definitive “beta” and “final” release dates for all 4 products (entire new version 4’s for RO and for DA/Delphi, and incremental updates for DA/.NET) over the upcoming months.

And yes, these plans do include new major versions of our two core Delphi products. Next to our endeavors into the realm of .NET, we have always remained commited to our Delphi products and our Delphi customers, and we do believe that Win32 will continue to be an important development platform for the forseable future. What’s more, it seems that with Delphi 2006 Borland has released a very solid and promising new version of Delphi, which has every chance of finally replacing the aged Delphi 7 as IDE of choice for Win32 developers. And that is good news for everyone!

In the mean time, make sure to check out our Data Abstract for .NET trial!

Yours
marc hoffman
Chief Architect, .NET
RemObjects Software