While Dan doesn't work for them, he has had occasion to see their source code. Who are they? Only the biggest and best in all of Europe when it comes to document management!

But having thousands of customers using your .Net product isn't enough. No, their biggest asset is customization. Not just for the high-rollers, when a customer --- any customer --- asks for even the slightest change, they listen. And how do they do it? Let's take a look!

Say, for instance, that Frobozz Inc. just can't deal with the default background color of the application any more. It's red and they want to see black. No problem! 

  If CustomerID = 1337 Then
      /* paid support bug #1337/94952 */
      Box.Background.Color = Color.Black
  Else
      Box.Background.Color = Color.Red
  End If

 

Forget configuration files, it's much easier to hard-code this sort of thing into the application. Needless to say, when you have thousands of customers and get lots of feature requests every week, the updated binaries that get pushed out grow by a couple of megabytes every time. Especially when you don't use Switch. But that's not the best part.

To verify that they're allowed to use the software, customers must enter a serial number, the only piece of configuration data the application writes down. Luckily, it is just CustomerID and for ease of use there's a dialog that will change both for you. So if you're wondering what it'd be like to work someplace else, just change that number and you'll be able to see the world through another company's eyes.

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