Anyone else disappointed in GHI Products?

[jasdev]

If you follow this forum and read all the new posts, it would seem that the number of “bugs” being reported is overwhelming, and that they are not being fixed by GHI or Microsoft.

If you read the release notes, and the known issues section, and try to match that to what you read on this forum, there seems to be a lot of “bugs” that are not listed, and perhaps not being fixed.

Others have mentioned this before, but I too think it would be very useful to have a bug tracking section where GHI could post bug reports (perhaps extracted from and linked to forum posts), indicate their status, and indicate how and when they are resolved. Each bug report would be tagged by controller board, by category (e.g., networking, GPIO, CAN, SPI), by NETMF version, by GHI SDK version, etcetera. They should be searchable as well. Every time a “duplicate” bug is reported on the forum, GHI can link that post to an entry in the bug tracking application.

[Gus_Issa]

The post release notes are kept to date with any know issues, which are very few and not critical.

[njbuch]

I agree, an official list of bugs, issues, feature request and ideas would beneficial.

Lots of issues are repeated too many times.

[jasdev]

@ Gus - I agree with you, but for new people (or people like me that are a little slow) it appears that there are more issues/bugs being reported on the forum than are acknowledged in the release notes, so the perception is that GHI and Microsoft are ignoring the “bug” reports or are slow to fix things.

[godefroi]

NETMF has an issue tracker where you can report, see, and vote on issues (whether or not it makes a difference, I don’t know).

GHI does not have a (public) issue tracker. It’s been requested, with no response.

[mhectorgato]

@godefroi

NETMF has an issue tracker where you can report, see, and vote on issues (whether or not it makes a difference, I don’t know).

GHI does not have a (public) issue tracker. It’s been requested, with no response.

One is an open source project. The other is a private commercial closed “project”.

One is nearly obliged to do so. The other has absolutely zero obligation to do so.

[jasdev]

@ mhectorgato - You are right, but the “bugs” are being aired in public on this forum anyway, and the result is that GHI products are being unfairly (in my opinion) tainted by what is said here. It would be better for everyone if there were an official bug tracking list.

[godefroi]

@mhectorgato

One is an open source project. The other is a private commercial closed “project”.

One is nearly obliged to do so. The other has absolutely zero obligation to do so.

Of course they have no obligation to. Neither does Microsoft, but Connect (http://connect.microsoft.com/) is quite useful.

A lot of time and energy is spent on this forum responding to known issues, and being able to point to an issue in a tracker with potential workarounds, fixes, and reproduction details would help not only new (and experienced) users, but also those who spend time supporting them (both GHI employees and non), as well as GHI themselves.

[mhectorgato]

@godefroi

@mhectorgato

One is an open source project. The other is a private commercial closed “project”.

One is nearly obliged to do so. The other has absolutely zero obligation to do so.

Of course they have no obligation to. Neither does Microsoft, but Connect (http://connect.microsoft.com/) is quite useful.

A lot of time and energy is spent on this forum responding to known issues, and being able to point to an issue in a tracker with potential workarounds, fixes, and reproduction details would help not only new (and experienced) users, but also those who spend time supporting them (both GHI employees and non), as well as GHI themselves.

I don’t disagree that it would be beneficial to this part of their user base.

But GHI may have business reasons not to, and that’s their primary Raison d’être. I don’t begrudge them for not doing it.

[mhectorgato]

@jasdev

@ mhectorgato - You are right, but the “bugs” are being aired in public on this forum anyway, and the result is that GHI products are being unfairly (in my opinion) tainted by what is said here. It would be better for everyone if there were an official bug tracking list.

One downside to such a list may be that the hobby community’s priorities and GHI’s business priority don’t always mesh up.

They may have a commercial customer which is making a (financial) commitment to them and requesting a specific issue to resolved or feature to be added.

Whereas a group of (vocal) community members complain about a bug.

Which bug/issue is more important to GHI?

[Gus_Issa]

@ mhectorgato - even worse when community complain about issues that do not exist or does not effect them! Anyway this will be over once the tracker system is up. We have been planning it for 2 weeks now!

[godefroi]

@mhectorgato

But GHI may have business reasons not to, and that’s their primary Raison d’être. I don’t begrudge them for not doing it.

Of course. They’re a business, and they’re doing business. That’s perfectly fine, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t take our business elsewhere, if we don’t like their policies (if there is an elsewhere, and for Gadgeteer, there isn’t really…).

[mhectorgato]

@godefroi

@mhectorgato

But GHI may have business reasons not to, and that’s their primary Raison d’être. I don’t begrudge them for not doing it.

Of course. They’re a business, and they’re doing business. That’s perfectly fine, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t take our business elsewhere, if we don’t like their policies (if there is an elsewhere, and for Gadgeteer, there isn’t really…).

That’s 100% true

When co-workers complain to me about the company I work for I tell them:

The company has the right to do what it wants (within reason)
The other side of that that is that employees have have the right to leave if they don’t like it.

Same here and with many other industries as well. GHI has choices. And we the consumers have choices as well.

[Josh_ghielectroncs]

Just a sneak peak at the tracker that is coming soon.

[Tempered_Enterprises]

HAHA I opened a hornet’s nest.

Now let me tell you a bit more about me.

I first stumbled across .NET micro framework (before it was open source) in 2009. Since then I have purchased GHI Electronics stuff every few years. As a C# guy, these things have more potential then the iPhone. But GHI doesn’t seem to share the vision I guess.

Well this time I just happened to be having a “bad day” where nothing was working. In some frustration I pretty much just lost it. To outline the point, I had been cutting 5/8" aluminum, incorrectly, with a drill press. It had just snapped back and bashed my thumb.

While not there, if they ever do figure out how to streamline these things, you will soon find them in TVs, Ovens, Refrigerators, Wall outlets, etc…etc…etc…

Well I complain and I share. There’s the code and I am pretty sure it will work on ANY processor that does not support the Util.SetSpecialBlahBlah(). What needs to be done to recompile the whole library? I’m down to recompile the OSHW stuff to get the Cerb to rotate that display.

I have MSDN Ultimate so I think I can download just about any compile tool.

What would be best, I think, is if GHI would merge the source with the compile server. In this way, anyone with an account could publish changes, then like wikipedia anyone else could roll them back, in this way a consensus would be reached, then every night the server would compile the binaries. Add forking and branches for some real sexyness.

Either GHI is going to step it up to solve the problems, Hire more people, or leverage the OS Community. GHI’s SDK should be leveraging NuGET (or something like it) to keep it up to date.

Someone at least tell me GHI looked at the rotation code?

[Jay_Jay]

@Josh

Just a sneak peak at the tracker that is coming soon.

may I suggest adding a section in the bug report for Code to reproduce the bug and code for workaround… so people can actually try to reproduce the bug before voting to make sure it is a bug and not a power issue for example…

also it would be great to help minimize extra questions by adding a pre-defined drop downs with versions and all available boards where the bug is being discovered… so one is forced to pick a board and a version that he/she is working on… let’s not forget Emulator and others as options…

cheers,
Jay.

[Gus_Issa]

@ Jay Jay - but all that can be done in the description and in the replies. In my opinion, I want it simple and clean to not scare away anyone even if a poster didn’t include all details the replies will cover them?

[danibjor]

@Gus

… simple and clean to not scare away anyone …

It’s better to get bugs reported, even with missing information - than letting them slide by undiscovered by those who can fix it - just because it’s a hassle to report them.

[Jay_Jay]

@Gus

@ Jay Jay - but all that can be done in the description and in the replies. In my opinion, I want it simple and clean to not scare away anyone even if a poster didn’t include all details the replies will cover them?

guys you will be creating a duplicate form of a forum then…

this is a bug tracking system not just bug reporting system…

one should be able to search for a bug before reporting one… meaning when I experience a behavior that could explain a possible bug, I should first go to the bug tracking do a search for such thing… let’s assume I find a bug now I should be able to learn quickly if the reported bug is affecting my current system meaning firmware version, hardware, netmf version and so on or is it affecting an older system and was already fix, so I would simply need to update my current setup and so on, WITHOUT ME Going through hundreds of post readings just to find out that this bug has nothing to do with my system and that in my opinion is a hassle. And the fix is a simple update… remember GHI deals with all kind of versions from4.1 to 4.2, different types of firmware open, premium and so on…unlike NETMF where everything reported is targeted at 4.3 and that’s why the current codeplex bug tracking works…

so I would again recommend to add the drop downs, I mean five drop down won’t stop someone from reporting a bug, and keeping it clean and simple by introducing a link to discuss the bug back into the forum kind of like what you guys do with CODESHARE… learn from your own best practices

cheers,
Jay.

[Gus_Issa]

@ Jay Jay - hundreds? I guess in my head this tracker will have few, maybe 10 but under 100 open issues. But this is a new feature and it will include other things, like website issues so it may get to be hundreds… but then if it is hundreds then this may end up being counter productive maybe.

So what are the fields you will be adding if you were doing this? We used codeplex as a starting point by the way.