Connect - will it ever get fixed?

Hi David,

I am terribly sorry to hear that you are having these issues with parametric modelling. We are trying to address all the issues that are being found as quickly as we can, for all product areas.

We are working with support and development to resolve this specific issue, we are reviewing all the information you sent us.

I understand how frustrating this is for you (and for all our users who encounter an work-disrupting issue), we are trying to fix as many issues as possible and to improve MicroStation CONNECT as quickly as we can.

I will get back to you as soon as we have more detailed information on this.

Regards,
Marco

It looks like Bentley doesn't really test its product before releasing it. How does Bentley actually tests its products? Product should be tested by users (designers) and not Bentley box tickers. So, you do not test a product by ticking boxes whether you can open a file, draw a line, open reference dialog box, copy/paste etc. to mention a few.

It took Bentley 14 years to create a 64-bit application and yet still it is a unstable product! How much time does Bentley need to actually create a stable working product? Using the CONNECT Edition as platform for other products is going to be a nightmare!

Hi,

although I think there are many things Bentley can and shoud do better, I disagree with you in some topics:

Unknown said:

It looks like Bentley doesn't really test its product before releasing it.

It made me laugh. Seriously, testing of any software product today is nearly never realized as ticking checkbox or whatevever else on GUI level. I am very sure Bentley developers implemented complex both code and user testing. Despite of plenty of bugs and "not bugs but not good enoug implemented features" have been discussed, MicroStation CONNECT Edition is pretty stable from its first beta.

As far as I know nobody in software industry today believe or expect it's possible to produce software without bugs, especially if it's complex as MicroStation and if rewritten from scratch. Yes, testing (and there are many types of testing used in software development) decreases number of bugs, but it doesn't solve everything. So important is (and it's one of a main idea behing agile development) how quickly are you able to implement the fixt and to release a new version. And it's what Bentley don't do well in my opininon: Waiting many months for new version if everybody had to know years ago that at least one year after CONNECT Edition well be released many bugs and backlogs will be discovered is bad.

Unknown said:

So, you do not test a product by ticking boxes whether you can open a file, draw a line, open reference dialog box, copy/paste etc. to mention a few.

Hmmm .... so why all operations you mentioned work fine? My feeling is the most of discovered bugs are associated with a different functionality between V8i and CE, often in complex scenarios (probably because the code was rewritten) or with new features like parametric modelling (which is completely new concept in MicroStation developed on new Parasolid library). I see no option how open a file, draw a line, open reference... can discover these bugs.

Unknown said:

It took Bentley 14 years to create a 64-bit application

Interesting. Woudl you be so kind and to explain how do you compute 14 years? Or is it just "a number" to express how bad Bentley are?

Unknown said:

Using the CONNECT Edition as platform for other products is going to be a nightmare!

Do you have a personal experience? As far as I know no product like PowerCivil, Bentley Map or AECOsim Building Designer has been released yet on CONNECT Edition platform? I guess the main reason of this fact (which is not good at all, because these products are often more imporant than MicroStation itself) is not (in)stability of MicroStation, but an effort required to migrate and rewrite applications code, adapt to a new GUI, new configuration structure etc. i hope Bentley will be able to release them this year.

With regards,

  Jan

dear Jan ,
no one of us disputes work of Bentley, but all of us use MS as a means of production, we all need to have a reliable tool for daily work and the fact is, despite the efforts Bentley, that Connect r.00.25 has many bugs and we are forced to work with V8i, that's all
we all wish new and reliable update
Karol

I seem to remember years ago I went to a Bentley training seminar specifically for Microstation Administrators. In this training class we were told that Bentley was working on a method that would allow them to release patches to the software rather than waiting for a completely new version of Microstation to be released. I want to say this was between the initial release of Microstation v8 & Microstation v8 2004. To date I have never heard of any patches being released. I've always had to download and install an entirely new version of the software. I do not keep up with or know a lot about software development but I know that other software companies released patches to fix specific problems. Why can't Bentley work on specific problems and release such patches. Surely it would be better to fix a couple of problems at a time for their current software rather than trying to rewrite everything for the next major release.

As I've been pushing in some other posts recently regarding problems with Microstation, FIX WHAT IS BROKEN BEFORE ADDING NEW!!!