Well, this had to come. When we compiled the feature set for ORF 3.0, my estimation for Reporting was 35-49 days—making it the biggest single feature we ever added to ORF. This estimation assumed that reports will be generated from the current logs, but later several problems were identified with this concept. We faced with a decision: either we will generate reports that A) are useful, or just generate B) some eye-candy summary. We decided to go with the option A), which required a new logging medium and lots of related work, doubling the resources needed. This is reflected in development: we are about to reach the 49 days limit and Reporting is about halfway to be completed.
It became obvious that Reporting will predate other planned features of ORF 3.0. We have updated the ORF Development Roadmap according to this.
We apologize for this feature creep, I know many of you expected these features much. We will do our best to get them into ORF as soon as possible.
I can’t but help comparing this slippage to the regular Microsoft slew.
It has been almost 4 years since Microsoft made a big paradigm shift from COM to .NET and still there are things that you can’t do easily.
Trouble was that so much of the original NT infrastructure had to be rewritten to provide .NET rather than COM interfaces.
They did provide the Interop and updated IIS, BixTalk etc. but access to the COM based Services was very difficult.
Examples included the SMTP interfaces used by ORFEE and the Interfaces into the Task Scheduler.
MS have revealed roadmaps for things like WinFX, Indigo, and WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), it will take another n years to get IPC back to where it was under COM.
Finally MS have provided a kit to allow c# access to the SMTP interfaces see above. I am going to play with it a bit, but my main focus right now is getting an External Agent that does Vipul’s razor.
It is similar in the way how costs are getting incremental. The larger the software, the more expensive a small change.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/53298.aspx describes how it works in a large organization.
It’s indeed a little sad that those things won’t be in, but on the other hand…you made a bunch of people happy down here with the stats thing!