Building version 1.1 has been a tough work, that's why I disappeared for a while. New features have been added but, most of all, a lot of testing has been done, making this release a lot more stable than the previous.
The leit-motiv of this release is "Listen to the users".

 

First, I focused on making the software easier to configure.
Working with SQL server is at the root of the issue: non technical users must always find out a SQL instance to connect to or install a free version on their machine. Both these tasks are not trivial for some business user.
Unluckily, there are few things to do about that without radically changing the product proposition.
I've been suggested to support MS Access as well; I do not reject the idea in principle but it requires a fairly large amount of work and automatically downsizes the application.
So, be prepared to see some news on this topic in the near future.

 

In the meanwhile, I introduced a configuration wizard that guides users through the configuration steps in a colloquial way.

 

Windows authentication is now supported, making configuration somewhat easier, especially after installing the SQL server express versions. From a technical perspective, anyway, lacking this support was a big turnoff.

 

There is a totally new set of demo data, more consistent and sensible, based on Microsoft's Adventure Works database. Some users may also be more familiar with it.

 

The new "web bar" feature is aimed at communicating with the users; given the downloads I had, I got too little feedback. So I encourage all of you to make use of the new "Complain" feature that will land directly on me everything you need to tell. Actually I was thinking to name the feature "Yell at me", but it looked rather unprofessional.
Beside the complaints, you can access directly the knowledge base, the user forum, this blog and the user manual. Do not hesitate to use the forums either, too few use it now and mail me directly. I think that sharing your thoughts should be an advantage for everyone. (actually, I've been told that the forum look is too old style, but I'm working on it, just be a little patient!).

 

On the client side, I added an option to hide the query row headers. This is useful for synchronized queries placed side by side, like previous versus current year. I will never stress enough that this feature is very hard to be found in other query packages.

 

Finally, a slightly better look has been designed and a number of bugs have been fixed. See the knowledge base to learn about the fixed known issues.

 

So, I release this version to you. I'd really love to hear your feedback. If you buy Viney@rd now, I'm happy, if you don't and you want to explain me why, I'm even happier because this gives me a chance to make you change your mind.

 

Enjoy

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