forum.vdsworld.com

PGWARE · **Web Host** Joined: 29 Dec 2001 Posts: 1567

Please don't upload the binary or keygens Smile

It's really up to CR what they do with vds 6.

I offered $20,000 USD originally and upped that to 30k but the owner said no. I asked how much he had paid for vds and he never quoted what was paid to Jules. I was given the vague response that it was alot of money. Little did I know until today thanks to Jules that it really was in the sum of $5,000. This is a very small amount of money for a commercial product which was and still is fantastic.

I was told I would have to pay much more than $100,000 for the source code to VDS and the rights, no real amount was agreed upon. I also wasn't willing to pay even close to that when I could have a similar (but not as good) product built off-shore for considerably less.

As it is right now I probably would not purchase VDS (that's if it were even up for sale). The market for development environments is too saturated with many free alternatives or very low cost alternatives.

Jules you aren't the only one that was stiffed on the royalties. Each copy of VDS 5 that included a copy of Alloy Lite was supposed to return a portion of the sales back to me, I have to this date received $0. I have not pressed the issue as it's likely a few thousand dollars at most and it's unlikely I would ever get paid since getting in touch with CR is very difficult at best. But rest assured it's extremely unlikely I would ever contribute another commercial product to be distributed with VDS ever again.

Aslan · Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 2:44 am Post subject:

The seemingly lack of interest from CR with VDS is why I was so excited about GadgetX. It seems that VDS soon won't be commercially viable if not already. Correct me if I'm wrong but Dragonshere has a good point that VDS's simplicity was the reason for its popularity. Ever since VDS added the API call functionallity there is not much more to improve on and still remain simple. This is what drew me to VDS. I believe simplicity was Jules's main intention for VDS when he created it. For people that want more advanced features, there seems to always be someone willing to create an extention when there is a sizable demand for it. With the advent of GadgetX all I was hoping for from VDS was Vista compatability (maybe even a 64 bit version) and some of the compiling features Jules has mentioned in the past.

For those that seem a bit shy at taking on GadgetX, let me ask you something... How hard and how long did it take for you to learn VDS?
I'd like to submit my own experience.

From nothing to becoming farely proficient with VDS = 3 to 6 months (VDS 2.2)

From being proficient with VDS to getting a farely good grasp of using GadgetX = 3 to 6 months, less if you have plenty of time to spend on it.

As far as being advanced with GadgetX I can't say because it opens up a whole new world of possibilities and I'm just not there yet. It depends on how much time you can devote to using it. Plus I have to say that I've never gotten better support from any product like I get for GadgetX.

Heck, I bet Dragonshere will even give you a cookie for visiting his site Smile

One last thing. I doubt there are many that can say they love VDS as much as I do but.... $100,000 FOR THE RIGHTS TO VDS AFTER ONLY PAYING $5000 FOR IT. YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!

JRoza · Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 6:45 am Post subject:

Should it ever come to an open source VDS project I would be more than happy to help with development/bug fixing in Delphi.
For the last year I've started using Delphi more and more and although I miss the simplicity of VDS I love the enormous amount of possibilities that Delphi and its added components offer me.

Still I don't wanna miss VDS as it still is a joy to use for many things I like to do, so let's hope one way or other VDS 6 will ever see the light of day.

Very Happy

Jan Roza

jules · Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 7:21 am Post subject:

JRoza · Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 12:02 pm Post subject:

jules · Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 1:19 pm Post subject:

Commercial Research as such does not really exist in the sense of a company on which anyone's jobs depend. It is just a company name set up to sell VDS. Perhaps it is also a vehicle for the owner to invoice clients for private consultancy work, but I wouldn't know about that.

I originally sold VDS to SADE, a French Internet consultancy company. They were users of VDS, and as far as I know they bought it mainly to protect their investment in the code they had developed with it. Even then, I suspect that selling VDS to other users was a secondary interest for them, but since there was money to be made from it they did.

Then SADE went bankrupt and the owner created Commercial Research Ltd. as a new company to sell VDS. Though he is French, he used a UK company because - he told me at the time - this was around the time of the Iraq war and he feared there would be an anti-French backlash from the US because of France's opposition to the war, which might affect sales.

As far as I have been able to find out, Commercial Research has no other employees and sells no other products. And there is the problem. The owner of VDS is not a programmer. Unlike in the SADE days, he has no-one he can get to do any of the work. He has a full time job and does not depend on the income from VDS. And if that is very little, it probably isn't very important to him to release VDS 6 for sale. I suspect it is very little, judging by the small amount he was prepared to pay me to develop VDS 6 and the excuses I got for delayed payment (one was: his Paypal account had been phished!)

I think the only hope of getting VDS 6 released legally is for someone to get it back off of CR. But if he is going to ask an unreasonable price (unreasonable in my view is anything greater than zero, since sales are probably nonexistent and most of the goodwill of existing users gone) then he can effectively block that.

CR, meaning the owner, never has been interested in monitoring this forum. In fact, in the days when I did have a business relationship with him, I was threatened with having it terminated if I continued posting here myself. Again, a ridiculous situation, since if you look at all the other independent developed programming tools, they all maintain their customer loyalty largely because the users can have a direct interaction with the developer, and that is perhaps one of the few benefits of using a tool like that instead of one from Microsoft or Borland.

vdsalchemist · Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 2:26 pm Post subject:

Jules,
To be very frank and honest. I really don't need the code. I would just like the rights to build a language with the same syntax. I am confident enough in my abilities as a programmer to build a clone and I know others have already built clones of VDS but those were squashed by CR. If we had the rights even without the code we could still keep VDS alive.

As for GadgetX the DLL was originally built before VDS 5 and it's abilities to call the Win32 DLL's. For the most part even with all the abilities of both VDS and GadgetX we are still using technology from the Windows 95 era. GadgetX just allows those who have invested a lot of time and effort in VDS to stay with VDS if they choose too. Also GadgetX has far more than just Win32 API support. Well you can take a look at the short features list. There is more but this is not the thread for a Sales pitch. Also Jules I was going to give you a copy of the DLL just because you have given us so much but I don't know your email address and if you would even be interested.

Aslan,
Thank you so much for your kind words. At least I know my hard work means something to others.

As far as other languages go. I have used many different languages including all the major ones and personally I hate writting code in C, C++, VB, Delphi, and all the other languages. First and formost in Visual C++ Express you have to also download the full Win32 SDK just to build simple Win32 GUI applications unless you want to dive into trying to use the CLR and build dotNet Forms applications. Second C# and VB.net is just overkill... You have to memorize a ton of NameSpace hierarchies just to get to the objects. You spend more time typing Namespacethis.Namespacethat.objectthis.objectthat.... before you even get to the Method to use. Delphi well lets just say I can read Delphi but I always forget when and where to put the ':'s... C is the same way and just full of syntax requirements. Java hmmm a language named after a small island or is it a language to control coffee makers. I don't know but the code it generates is very slow. I guess I downloaded the decafinated version. Most other scripting languages are usually a clone of Basic or C and they have the same issues as the languages they cloned. Just because the code you write in these other languages works once does not mean that same code will continue to work. With VDS once you write it and it is working it seems to keep working exactly the same way forever barring OS upgrades.
Also you really don't see many people writting addon's for the VDS IDE but you see it all the time for these other languages. I spend more time getting their silly IDE's to work correctly than I do actually writting code. I recently installed both Visual C++ Express and C# Express and I got to tell you they are definately not a full development environment.

Also just so everyone knows... I work a full time job too so I don't see that as an excuse for the lack of responsibility on the part of CR. I am not a CR basher but a little effort goes a long way.

Anyway I am sorry to start such a thread like this. To get back on the subject.

TDK161 did you get your registration information yet? It's been a week now since the original request.

Anyway times a wasting and I have others to help and support... Jules if you want a free copy of GadgetX just send me an email or PM me here and I will set you up.

jwfv · Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 2:43 pm Post subject:

I agree that a major overhaul or feature upgrade of VDS is not needed. It is fairly lean, and I like it that way. I think of it as a general-purpose backbone, with various extensions and .dsu's available for specific extra functions.

I WOULD love to see VDS6 (or 7 or 8 ) come out with some nice little features such as:

- greater number of variables allowed
- greater number of user-defined functions allowed
- browser element without version-checking
- more options for SELECTing dialogs
- improved Vista compatibility
- some form of XML parsing
- etc.

I'm sure there are many other improvements that would be extremely useful as well.

And Jules mentioned that VDS was never meant to be a development language, but I can tell you that it comes pretty close. I developed an app that is in use in about 100 insurance agencies, and it chugs along very predictably - even in some outdated computing environments. The users love the nice interface and speed of the program. I get comments about our software constantly. The code of the main module is over 18000 lines long, but is very easy to update and adapt.

Case in point: yesterday our largest client had a feature request and found a bug that had never shown up for anyone else. He let me know that at 3:00 and by 4:00 I had a recompiled update for him that fixed the bug and included the new feature. Needless to say, he was blown away.

I guess my point is that VDS is really a pleasure to create software with. You can go from idea to execution in minutes (literally.) It encourages me to test out ideas frequently - some of which work and some of which don't. But I know that without it, my company would not have been as successful.

I would love to see the development of VDS continue in some way. And it would be an extreme shame to see it slowly wither.

jules · Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 2:59 pm Post subject:

Dragonsphere.

First, thanks for the offer of a copy of GadgetX. I won't take you up on it now because in all probability I won't use it. As I said, the kind of things I use VDS for really don't need it.

As for developing a VDS clone, if that's what you want to do why not just do it? I very much doubt that CR has taken any legal steps to copyright the language. Plus, if they can't even be bothered to support existing customers and make the effort to release the new version that has been developed (and which they paid for) then do you suppose they will actually be bothered to try to stop you? If you avoided using the actual name then I doubt if there is anything they could do to stop you.

But it is not a course of action I would recommend. It would be very difficult to develop a clone from scratch that performed in the same way as the existing VDS down to the smallest detail. And that really is important if you would want existing users with a substantial code base to migrate to your version. I know from personal experience developing the new versions how annoying it is when an "improvement" I made to the code turns out to have an unexpected side effect that changes the way a command worked compared to the previous version. It is very hard to avoid creating minor incompatibilities even when working with the existing code base.

The DialogScript language is far from perfect. It really was not "designed" as such, it just grew in an unstructured way from small beginnings. If I was starting again, today, I would not create a language that was exactly the same. I would learn from the mistakes I made (or the things I never thought of) to create a language that kept the simplicity and ease of use of DialogScript but avoided its limitations. And there is *nothing* CR could do to stop anyone who wanted to from creating a new, different language.

But it would probably take a year to develop from scratch something that rivals what VDS 6 could have today. Say $50,000 worth of development effort. It's pretty hard to sell shareware these days and as PG pointed out, there are already several competitors. Would it be worth it?

jules · Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 3:01 pm Post subject:

vdsalchemist · Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 3:29 pm Post subject:

jules · Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 4:08 pm Post subject:

I meant a year working full time, which is probably less than the total amount of time spent to get VDS 6 to its current state.

Skit never finished his clone, which is a shame, because it would have been nice to use VDS for web page scripting. But he only implemented a small subset of VDS functionality, and it was not completely compatible with VDS syntax. Which was really my point: that someone with a 90,000 line script does not want to have to go back to scratch debugging because some function is working in a slightly different way, like a command resetting @OK() when the previous version preserved the value it was when entered. Just an example of functionality where the exact behaviour may not even be documented but changing it can cause existing scripts to go haywire.

Personally if I was going to develop a new easy scripting language I'd do it in C#. This would give you a small runtime that would leverage the .NET runtime that is installed on most PCs nowadays (and increasing.) But I'm not going to do that since I develop websites these days and it's much less hassle to just sit back and let the affiliate commissions and Adsense earnings roll in, even if you lie in bed all day or go on holiday, than deal with an inbox full of support requests every morning. Smile

PGWARE · **Web Host** Joined: 29 Dec 2001 Posts: 1567

When I spoke with the owner of CR a few months ago, he was preparing a new website and packaging VDS 6 to get ready. This was December 06 and he was very confident VDS would be released by Christmas. That never happened, I spoke to him again around Jan-Feb of 07 and the status of the new website which was almost complete and the package of VDS 6 was ready. I was to receive the VDS build any minute but for unknown reasons that never happened.

I did work on a side project for him for his other business which is to run a server/datacenter. It seems there is more of a focus on this line of work than with VDS as it's probably longterm more profitable.

Since that time I have not seen him online or spoken to him. I hope he is doing well.

As for VDS, well I'm not sure what the future of it is. It's likely VDS 6 will be released eventually, the sooner the better.

Skit3000 · Posted: Sun May 27, 2007 7:29 pm Post subject:

arcray · Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 10:07 am Post subject:

I have been talking to CR for some time as we had, like jwfv, developed distributed quoting engines for the insurance industry in the UK. Turnover for these engines runs to around 25 million pounds from which we are paid a very small commission.

We have always been promised that the new version of VDS (mainly because we needed the facilty for more variables) was going to be released very very soon. I live in the south of France, very close to where Emmanuel lives when he is down here and I offered to buy 5 copies of VDS6. even before it was out!

Since Feb '07 I have had a number of new projects and I took the decision that I would not use VDS6 (or 5) to develop them...

We chose a combination of Coldfusion and Flash forms to migrate all our projects across to the web (and desktop: see Apollo, Flex etc., ) and I am still struggling with the vast differences in programming techniques. For a while Skit's script conversion to web side looked promising, but it seemed to have fallen by the roadside.

Actionscript and javascript and the various IDEs make me want to use VDS6 again, but I just cannot base our future business plans on an ailing programming language with zero support and poor prospects of future development.

We were prepared to offer up to 10,000 UK pounds to take over the future rights to the VDS programming language and would have also made a big marketing push to get it more widely used in the real world.

Sadly I don't think we will now, even if the opportunity arose...