We created and published a SmartInspect Executive Summary document as a help and guide for new customers and decision makers. The Executive Summary document explains SmartInspect (and logging) from a non-technical standpoint and lists SmartInspect’s benefits, key facts and its licensing structure. This document is the perfect guide for decision makers who want to learn more about SmartInspect in a short period of time (it’s only 3 pages).
Quite a few of our contacts from new prospective customers are assigned with the task to evaluate different logging tools and to recommend a solution to the person who will make the final decision. We wanted to help these people by providing them with a document that they can use to inform decision makers about SmartInspect.
This document is also a great tool for developers who want to use SmartInspect and who have to convince their bosses that SmartInspect is the right tool.
If you think that any important information is missing from the document, I would love to hear from you (either leave a comment or email me).
» SmartInspect Executive Summary (PDF)
We just released SmartInspect 2.3.4. You can download the new version from My Gurock.com. It’s a minor release with just two changes: we optimized the TCP/IP server in the SmartInspect Console even further and fixed a bug that could block client applications for a few hundred milliseconds once in a while.
The SmartInspect TCP/IP code in the Console is actually quite complicated. It’s not just a simple TCP/IP server that receives logging packets and displays the data in the Console. To differentiate ourselves from competing products, we invested a lot of time in the past to make sure that the SmartInspect Console is blazingly fast and makes use of smart queues, dispatcher threads and techniques to reduce GUI updates.
I wrote the original code, but after Tobias refactored the logic over the past few weeks, he was able to optimize the TCP/IP server to make it three times as fast as before without reducing the overall responsiveness of the Console. Our tests haven’t shown any problems, but if there’s anything that’s not working optimally for you, we would love to hear from you.
This is just a quick reminder for those of you who attend EKON Spring this week. Daniel Wischnewski will be holding a SmartInspect session on Wednesday titled Logging with SmartInspect. If you are interested in getting started with SmartInspect, you shouldn’t miss this one.
Thanks to Olaf for reminding me about this one. Bob Walsh’s recently released ebook MicroISV Sites that Sell is featured on Bits du Jour today. This means that you can get Bob’s ebook about unique selling propositions for just $10 for the rest of the day. If you are into selling software or services and want to improve your website, this is your chance:
MicroISV Sites that Sell (just $10 today!)
From time to time we get questions about using SmartInspect in combination with Delphi 5. There seem to be surprisingly many people who still use this particular version of Delphi. Delphi 5 was a nice release back then and it seems like a lot of people simply don’t feel the need to upgrade to a newer version or still use it for legacy applications.
Although we don’t officially support Delphi 5 with SmartInspect 2.x, we had a version of the SmartInspect Delphi library for SmartInspect 1.4 which runs fine with Delphi 5. This library doesn’t support some of the newer features of SmartInspect 2.x like Unicode (this is actually the main reason we don’t support Delphi 5 with SmartInspect 2.x because Delphi 5 lacks a lot of Unicode related functions), the Watches Graph, the backlog protocol feature and others. The good news is that the current Console version is fully backwards-compatible and can work with the data from older SmartInspect libraries. You thus still benefit from some of the new features like the marker functionality or the improved filtering and navigation capabilities even when using the old library.
So, if you need a logging solution for your Delphi 5 application, send us an email and we are happy to help you evaluate SmartInspect with Delphi 5.
We have been taking a small hit on every SmartInspect USD sale in the past 10 or so months due to the weak USD. Because the exchange rate reached a level that we cannot ignore anymore, we will adjust our USD prices to match the Euro prices. Here are the new USD prices (our Euro prices will stay the same):
| License |
Current Price |
New Price |
| SmartInspect Single User |
$299 |
$339 |
| SmartInspect 5 User Pack |
$1,049 |
$1,199 |
| SmartInspect 10 User Pack |
$1,999 |
$2,199 |
| SmartInspect 25 User Pack |
$4,499 |
$4,999 |
| SmartInspect 100 User Pack |
$14,999 |
$16,999 |
| Additional support year per user |
$59 |
$69 |
The price changes will go live on February 18th (two weeks from now). If you are planning to order SmartInspect in the coming weeks, this would be a good chance to save some dollars before the new prices come into effect.
(Note: Although this is primary a C#/.NET thing, this is also posted on DelphiFeeds.com as I think this might be interesting for Delphi developers as well. Maybe this or a similar abstraction is even something to consider for the DPL?)
I did the final presentation for my CS Bachelor thesis at the University of Paderborn today. I thought I would share the thesis here, maybe some of you find it an interesting read. In one sentence, it’s about simplifying concurrent programming with several (new) higher-level abstractions. Here’s the summary:
Although being touted as the next big thing for years now, concurrent programming is still very difficult and error-prone even in modern programming languages and environments. Concurrent and in particular multithreaded programming still requires deep knowledge of low-level techniques like threading or locks and experience with deadlocks, race conditions and other subtle and hard to find concurrency problems. High-level concurrency abstractions and patterns can simplify concurrent programming but are only starting to become available in modern mainstream programming languages.
One of these high-level abstractions is the so called Active Object pattern. The Active Object pattern works, as the name implies, on the object level and not on an object hierarchy like most other design patterns. With an active object, method invocation is decoupled from the actual method execution, i.e. invoked methods of these objects are executed asynchronously and do not block the caller. There are several variants of this pattern known, but all have in common that the concurrency functionality is achieved by running methods in a thread or process context different from that of the caller. Possible results of active methods are encapsulated in so called future objects which can be seen as placeholders or contracts for the real results.
I will post the related code (the active objects runtime library as well as the related code generator/compiler) later this week or maybe early next week. So without further ado, Active Objects and Futures: A Concurrency Abstraction Implemented for C# and .NET.
We wish all our customers, partners, vendors and friends happy holidays and a happy and successful new year (or, as we say here in Germany, a good slide into the new year). 2007 was a crazy year for us and we had many important milestones of which the release of SmartInspect 2.0 was the most important one. We are looking forward to 2008 and are excited to see what the new year brings.
There is a very informative thread on BoS going on right now about getting a proper office. Most people advise the original poster against getting an office and suggest saving the money instead. However, one important reason for getting a proper office isn’t mentioned in the thread: separation of work and life. Separating work and life isn’t as easy if you work from an office at home. There are so many distractions that can lead to unproductivity in a home office that getting a proper office could pay off very quickly.
After working from a home office for some years now, we found it has many advantages on one hand and some serious drawbacks on the other hand. On the negative side, we found it quite stressful because we were basically working at all times. Although a proper office has other nice advantages like the possibility to grow, to invite partners, vendors and customers, we decided to get a proper office mainly for life and work separation. That’s why we have been looking for an office in the past few weeks and finally found one we like in the TechnologiePark Paderborn, where we will sign the lease in the coming week.
You have to decide for yourself if getting a proper office makes sense for you. We are sure that it’s the right thing for us and we are really looking forward to our new office in the coming year!
We just released a new SmartInspect version with official support for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. Grab the new version from our customer portal at My Gurock.com while it’s hot!
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