How you SHOULD handle support
For NH PRof, we are using AqiStar's TextBox.
To my knowledge, this is the only WPF syntax highlighting text editor that is available in the marker.
After taking it for a short trial run, I decided that I love it, bought three licenses and Rob implemented it for NH Prof. Introducing AqiStar's TextBox allowed us to delete a whole bunch of code, significantly improved the speed of the profiler and even fixed a memory leak that we had.
Good stuff all around.
Except, we had made an error (100% our issue, I admit) and we accidentally deployed the trial version instead of the licensed version. We didn't notice it at first because it was well.. in trial mode. But a trial eventually expires and we start getting errors.
I emailed AqiStar's support. Here is the exchange:
What you don't see is that their first response was a full explanation of the issue, three different ways of solving it, and it arrived within 16 hours of me first contacting them.
I also arrived when I was sleeping, so Rob and Christopher were able to fix the problem. But AqiStar's support followed through on that.
What you don't see here is that each of us got the error at roughly the same time and all of us contacted support independently.
Good stuff, did I mention already?
Comments
Sometimes it takes a horrible experience to truly appreciate the ones that do their job well.
It's my oppinion that doing one's job should be the norm; not something that suprises people. But it seems more and more that companies that meet (much less exceed) my expectations are becoming like diamonds in the rough.
I'm glad to hear both the good and the bad.
If I am impressed with NHibernate when my NHibernate in Action book turns up I might be buying your NHProf tool. If I have any problems with it I hope you practice what you preach :-)
@Peter Morris If you are not impressed with NHibernate I'll be rather surprised. It is an excellent platform that has saved me countless hours.
I think its great they gave such great service (and it clearly is), but isn't the difference that these guys knew the problem and how to fix it.. where as some 'other guys' didn't know the problem but we're at least trying to understand it?
Oren I have a hard time believing this story. You state that you were asleep, but we all know for a fact that you do not sleep. ;)
There's something else that should be mentioned about AqiStar. We also expressed some problems with x64 and they have already fixed the problem and deployed an updated version. That's cool.
By the way, it is not the only WPF syntax highlighting text editor, it is the only well-documented one. There is an AvalonEdit in SharpDevelop 4 sources, which quite simple to use, but has zero documentation and may have some quirks (though I have yet to meet one).
In general, #Develop folks are a goldmine, especially considering that they had the best C# 3 parser in NRefactory (Mono one is probably the same level or better, but it was GPL when I was choosing parsers).
All 3 of you contacted support at the same time...
it seems strange that none of you seem to have responded to support to let them know that you had fixed your problem, which seems to tally quite well with the communication aspects of the XHEO response.