Happy 6th anniversary, LLBLGen Pro!
Today, it's been exactly 6 years ago we released the first version of LLBLGen Pro, v1.0.2003.1 after a development period of roughly 9 months (Sunday september 7th 2003, late in the evening). It was a big gamble, would it succeed or fail? We got our first customer within 9 minutes after release and we then knew it would be a success. And it still is, with thousands of companies using it world-wide, from small mom & pop shops to the biggest banks on the planet. Honestly, we hoped for success but that it took off this big was beyond our expectations. A big thank you! to all of our loyal customers who trusted our work in the past 6 years and who are keep trusting it.
Needless to say, we're still going strong and are looking forward to v3.0 which is scheduled to go beta at the end of the year. It will actually be our 10th major version (1.0.2003.1, 1.0.2003.2, 1.0.2003.3, 1.0.2004.1, 1.0.2004.2, 1.0.2005.1, 2.0, 2.5, 2.6) since the initial release, and will be the first release which will support other frameworks besides our own runtime framework and will also add another major new approach: model first.
Looking back at those 6 years, I think the biggest asset we deliver is quality you can count on. From the get-go we strived for that aspect, with top-notch support which is free and bug-fixes which are usually delivered within 24 hours. A data-access technology isn't something you just pick out of a pool of tools, it has to fit your way of how you want to write software and work with data, what you want to do in your application and above all, has to be rock-solid so you don't run into surprises, unexpected lack of support for common features or a wall of disbelieve when you ask for help or support or a bugfix. So in other words, a data-access technology is one of the pillars your software has to count on. From the start we realized this and with every feature we added we made sure that indeed, our customers could indeed count on our work and the quality we deliver.
During these 6 years, we worked full time on implementing more features, like a new paradigm (Adapter), support for more databases, multiple ways to do inheritance, more powerful code generator engines, template editor, linq provider etc. and it was and still is simply great working on this every day. On to the next 6 years! 