************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * December 2006 * * * ************************************* News and Comments It's been another slow month in the computer industry. We continue to await the final release of the consumer version of Windows Vista so that we can officially say DB/C DX and DB/C FS are supported on Vista. We'll keep you updated. This month's article is about the current state of DB/C Software, both the company and the software code base. Happy New Year! don.wills@dbcsoftware.com ****************************************************************************** A Good Year DB/C Software Company has had another good year. The dollar value of new software license sales - DB/C DX and DB/C FS - was down about 10% in 2006 when compared with 2005, but the dollar value of support subscriptions actually increased slightly in 2006 compared to 2005. Importantly, support subscriptions now constitute almost half of DB/C Software Company revenue. The bottom line is that DB/C Software Company is profitable and has an ongoing stream of revenue that will sustain the company for many years. Moving to virtual offices has been good for DB/C Software Company. Key employee Joe Remes works from his suburban Chicago home. Don Wills works from his new Jackson Hole, Wyoming home. Sean Neeley, a full time employee of sister company Produce Pro, is occasionally called upon to assist the company with his expertise in certain areas. Anne Riordan handles all of the invoicing and bookkeeping on a part-time basis from her home in Chicago. Internet-based services provided by several companies have been integral to the success of the virtual office concept. The software that makes up DB/C DX and DB/C FS is in fine shape. The code that makes up the core is all written in C. The Eclipse DDT feature and the Java Smart Client are written in Java. The company has worked very hard to maintain a high degree of portability, as well as high performance and stability. The portability of DB/C DX and DB/C FS is excellent. Joe Remes is generally able to port these products to new chip architectures/operating systems that are shipped by computer manufacturers in a matter of hours. An example is DB/C DX and DB/C FS availability for the Itanium chip from Intel. The performance of DB/C DX and DB/C FS is generally excellent. There are plans for significant improvements in GUI Smart Client performance in DB/C DX 15. The stability of DB/C DX and DB/C FS is also excellent. The bugs that are encountered are generally limited to new features. Now that GUI Smart Client is becoming used by a larger number of customers, many inconsistencies have appeared between how GUI programs function in the Smart Client vs. the non-Smart Client environment. These types of bugs are the vast majority of problems that are encountered. It has been quite some time since there has been a data integrity bug, or some other really significant bug that had a large impact. The company will strive to keep it that way. Plans for the future include a .NET version of Smart Client that will be a complement to the two existing (C and Java) Smart Clients, performance improvements, and a significant overhaul to the graphical editor in DDT. Details about these and other changes will be announced in future months. ****************************************************************************** DB/C DX Class Schedule Class: DB/C DX Fundamentals Date: January, 2007 Location: Woodridge, Illinois For information, send email to admin@dbcsoftware.com. ****************************************************************************** Subscribing to the DB/C Newsletter If you don't already have the DB/C Newsletter delivered to your email address and would like to have it emailed to you monthly, just send an email message to dbcnews-subscribe@dbcsoftware.com. The newsletter will be delivered to the email address from which the message was sent.