At 09:24 AM 10/21/2004 +0930, Edward Halawa wrote:
The key to solution to IISiBat "surprises" I think is its future version ... I hope TNRSYS 16 "Visual Studio" (?) are free of all the "unpleasant surprises"of IISiBat so that the beginner like me or the "even more experienced users" donot have to lodge "complains" to their distributors, except for "very serious" problem.
Well I'd like to respectfully disagree. I've been using IISiBat for quite a while now and have found it to be robust, stable and an all-around excellent program. The thing to remember is that TRNSYS is an incredibly flexible tool and any interface that captures even a small portion of this inherent flexibility adds an incredible feature to the package as a whole. I have spent years working with TRNSYS, teaching TRNSYS, writing components for TRNSYS, and creating applications based on TRNSYS and can easily remember the pre-IIsibat period where all users had to write their input files using a text editor. In those days, the TRNSYS learning curve was nearly vertical and teaching TRNSYS to new users was incredibly difficult. These days, new users can be creating detailed simulations in a few hours - due almost entirely to IISiBat and its unique method of displaying components and their connections. Even advanced users have migrated to using IISiBat. Like any large piece of software, users will occasionally find a bug that needs to be fixed - I still find errors in Excel and Word - and those programs have budgets many times greater than that of IISiBat. Many of the bugs reported in IISIBat over the past few months are high in the advanced feature range - far from the everyday user realm - and have been fixed quickly upon notification. In fact of the 20 or so bugs that I have reported to CSTB over the past 5 years, almost all of them have been the fault of the user - -typically doing something wrong with a proforma (TMF) file (opening it in Word and saving it etc.).
If you consider the relative size of the TRNSYS user-group, you will quickly realize that TRNSYS is incredibly fortunate to have such an excellent front-end program available. All of the other premium simulation software packages have front-ends that pale in comparison to IISiBat. I understand the frustration of losing some work and/or discovering a bug in the software once in a while but try to keep in mind that everyone involved is striving to make the entire package flawless - but with millions of lines of code the odds of finding a bug at some point remains relatively high.
Jeff Thornton TESS ********************************************************************************* Thermal Energy System Specialists (TESS) Jeff Thornton 2916 Marketplace Drive Principal Suite 104 Phone: (608) 274-2577 Madison WI 53719 Fax: (608) 278-1475 USA E-mail: thornton@tess-inc.com Web Page: www.tess-inc.com "Providing software solutions for today's energy engineering projects" *********************************************************************************