Product Roadmap
A bright future lies ahead
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"It's been a long time since I've seen a software development product with such a
simple, modular, and yet sophisticated, design. It's evident that you and your
development staff have put much thought and effort into this extraordinary product!"
— David Daugherty, Team Worldwide
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This roadmap outlines the major themes in our product plans for the next several quarters, about as
far as we can see into the future. It’s impossible to cover every feature we might release, but this
should give you a sense of where we’re headed.
Please note that our development priorities do change based on customer feedback and other events.
We update this product roadmap as those priorities change.
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Easier Customization |
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We want to make Iron Speed Designer easier, friendlier and faster. We are working on
improving application customization through a variety of enhancements.
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New Page Types |
We plan to add a variety of new page types to compliment our existing pages.
Examples under consideration or development include:
- Workflow pages
- Wizard pages
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Reporting |
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Earlier releases introduced built-in report generation and data export. We plan to add
additional report types as well as enhance the content of the actual reports.
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Generated Application Enhancements |
Over the next few product releases, we’ll be adding more generated application enhancements.
It’s hard to list everything and we’re always receptive to customer input, so please let us know what
you want.
Features we're considering include:
- Make, model, year (dependent dropdown lists)
- Audit trail
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.NET Components and Features |
We’re planning to generate applications that use recently added .NET components and features, including:
- Dynamic data
- ListView and FormView
- LINQ
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AJAX Enabled Controls |
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Iron Speed Designer contains a variety of Ajax-based controls, including interactive search,
smooth panel updates and text and image pop-ups. Subsequent versions will include additional
Ajax-based .NET controls.
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Microsoft Windows and SQL Server |
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Our policy is to support released versions of Microsoft products (not beta releases).
While we cannot guarantee a specific date our support will be released, we anticipate within
90 days after Microsoft releases its final production version.
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Database Support |
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No additional databases are planned at this time and support for additional databases will depend
on customer demand. Supporting databases requires database-specific schema interrogation and
SQL generation logic to provide the level of code generation required for real-world applications.
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Release Strategy and Timing |
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Most of our users prefer frequent “feature modest” releases with less severe application
migration requirements. We always have new features under development, and this strategy allows
those ready for release to catch the “current train” while those not ready wait for the “next train”.
We don't forecast release dates since they fluctuate based on specific features and
our QA cycle. We prefer to let our QA team dictate the release date instead of the Marketing
department. We typically release three or four functionality releases per year plus several
maintenance releases. Details...
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Application Migration Strategy |
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Based on your feedback, our migration strategy is to preserve the look-and-feel of your
application pages to the extent possible rather than updating them to appear created by the
latest version. We are exploring a “re-generate page” option for those pages you want updated
with the latest version's features.
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Keeping Up-To-Date |
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Many of our customers stay current with an annual software update subscription. It’s the best way to
ensure you’re getting the most feature-rich apps possible. An update subscription includes major
functionality releases as well as all maintenance patches released during your subscription period.
Details...
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Let us know what you want |
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Our development plans change based on customer feedback, so we encourage you to communicate your
specific product needs to us. The best way to let us know what you want is either by submitting
a “feature request” support case or by posting a request in the
New Feature Requests forum.
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