18 February 2008

Better Development Tools -- Building Together

Dear early adopters!

We thank you kindly for your participation in ReSharper 4 early access program. It is going to be wonderful release for everyone, because of you. This time we receive the best response ever, and we are so excited about it!

Many brave developers, who are trying ReSharper 4 early builds with Visual Studio 2008, registered in our issue tracker and provided us with detailed, specific and very important information. This is really great, because we were able to reproduce many issues that were lurking around our code base for some time now. It is very important that you registered and provide us with non-anonymous feedback: bidirectional communication is at least 16 times more effective than one way exception submitting. One sample solution which manifests the problem is 256 times better than 1024 exceptions without a comment. And it is invaluable when you submit instructions to reproduce the problem (well, at least var value = int.MaxValue).

Thank you very much, we really appreciate your effort! With that kind of feedback we receive today, I believe we can build the best release of ReSharper, ever. Everybody wants better tools, right? ;)

Sincerely Yours, Ilya.

5 comments:

smhinsey said...

This is not strictly related but it'd kind of bugged me for awhile. JetBrains is really responsive to early adopters and seem to understand their value in terms of creating the best possible products. Why then aren't upgrade licenses available to early adopters? It's kind of frustrating to be the person who always buys a brand new license right when it comes out but can never take advantage of the upgrade licensing because you were one of the first people to buy a license. It seems like building return business through some sort of early adopter incentive makes just as much sense, if not more than, trying to do so by giving upgrades to recent purchasers.

Noam.Honig said...

I strongly agree with shawn

Mani said...

Great!, cant wait until the release version is complete, 2008 without resharper is a pain...

That said, I agree with Shawn as well, I'd like to know that the early adopters (usually the most passionate and loyal users) will be taken care of.

Krzysztof Koźmic said...

As about what Shawn said. Are you maybe considering rewarding early adopters the way Microsoft did in Windows Vista beta program? Everyone why reported at least one bug got a free Business version licence. I'm not suggesting you should give a free licence to everyone who clicks 'submit' when ReSharper crashes on her computer, but for example to report non-exception issue requires some effort, go to website, log in, look if issue has been already reporter, create issue entry, describe it...
Sure they get to use great product for free while its in EAP, and they do it for themselves, to get better product in the end, but on the other hand: its thanks to their effort ReSharper is so awesome :)

Ilya Ryzhenkov said...

I resisted to respond for a while, but now..

Are you guys submitting problems to be rewarded? I'm sure you are not. I have a tracking view about who reported what, I read EVERY non-exception report, and I track the input every day. This should give you enough hints about rewards ;)

That said, I don't want EAP to be some kind of a game or competition, so I won't publish any rules or official contest. There will be rewards, but who knows what they be?