> Refactor! Pro has more refactorings than any
> other refactoring tool (for any platform)

Really? Could you, please, list them for us to count them?

Valentin Kipiatkov
CTO and Chief Scientist
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com
“Develop with pleasure!”

With regard to company culture, I can assure you Developer Express has one of the most professional and disciplined group of developers of any business I’ve had the opportunity of working with in my 20+ years of writing software. This company is filled with hard working coders and team leaders who have flat-out earned my respect. Say what you want about me, but if creating the highest quality software is your goal, then there’s a lot that can be learned from the developers in this company.

Finally, with regard to the customer trust issue, I would encourage you to check out the “Refactor Multiple Users” thread in the “devexpress.public.dotnet.refactor.pro” newsgroup (at news.devexpress.com) for an honest assessment of how much we trust our customers compared with the competition. Any company with the will to stay in business must strike a balance between customer trust and loss prevention, and while it’s clear we can improve order processing speed and do a better job at setting new customer expectations, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of striking that balance overall.

Best regards,

Mark Miller
Chief Scientist, IDE Tools Division
Developer Express

You know, I think that one statement really says a lot about the culture and philosophies at Developer Express. I’m not sure who they’re afraid of, but my software dollars will be spent with a company that treats me with respect and trust, delivers customer service in “internet time”, and doesn’t try and tell me what email service I should be using (fer pete’s sake!)

when I read this your post, it so much reminded me of my own experiences with that company. I tried to buy their Refactor!Pro v1 product, and had to wait days and days (and write emails) to receive my license. When I tried the product and used it for a week, it was so full of bugs that I angrily deleted it from my PC and wrote them to send my money back. Actually, they were much faster sending my money back than they had been sending my license key.

I had read about their product here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/downloads/tools/refactor/
and after reading a very positive review by “MikeG1″ (on his otherwise really great larkware site) I decided to have a look at the software. But since there was no trial download for VS.NET 2003 (which I used at the time last summer) available on their web site, I had to buy it. And I did buy it, but soon wished I hadn’t. After a week or so using Refactor!Pro v1.0, I sent in a list with maybe 5 or 8 bugs (only a few, because I didn’t want to spend too much time documenting bugs) along with a note that this product was not “v 1.0″ but should be labeled “beta”. But I got my money back within days, so there is at least *something* that worked. And I got a very nice email from support, very much like their comments here.

Now, one year later, they have released v2 of Refactor!Pro, which I decided not even to try out. Reading this your post I see that my decision was right. Thank you!

Radi

Just to clarify, CodeRush and Refactor! Pro, as well as the freely available DXCore extensibility engine for Visual Studio, are all products that are managed by the IDE Tools team at Developer Express. In addition to IDE Tools, Developer Express crafts powerful and easy to use component sets, reporting tools, and frameworks for .NET developers. With regard to the question of team size, I consider that information a competitive advantage and so I won’t be publishing that, however I can say for the three products I manage, we have over 11,000 test cases, and that Refactor! Pro has more refactorings than any other refactoring tool (for any platform). Take a look at our momentum and you’ll get a sense of the real force behind these products.

Best regards,

Mark Miller
Chief Scientist, IDE Tools Division
Developer Express

I wonder if this is an issue of scale? Jetbrains struck me as really caring about their image so they scan blogs etc… Can they keep that up as they grow? How big are the makers of Code Rush?

Thanks for an informative blog post. You are right: our current ordering system is not optimal, be it the information on the web page or the speed at which we sometimes respond. I won’t belabor any excuses or reasons (in essence, we’re trying hard to control piracy as much as we can, but that effort shouldn’t impact legitimate customers like yourself), but I am forwarding the URL of this blog post to the team that’s in charge of rewriting our online store to ensure that the same problems don’t reappear when we launch the new website in a couple or so weeks’ time.

If you have any other comments about your ordering experience on our site, please either send me an email describing them so that I can do something about it, or add another blog post to your site here (and email me asking me to read it). Thanks for your help in helping us make your and other customers’ relationships with Developer Express the best, all the way from the ordering experience, through the use of our products, to their support.

Cheers, Julian