Tooting our own horn a little, we have had very positive feedback from many customers who have said our support is fantastic. We hope this addition helps us maintain end user happiness as we continue to grow and our support load scales up.

What is priority support?

Priority support is the option to ensure that your request is dealt with promptly, and is reviewed before and prioritised over normal forum posts. It is also useful for folks who wish to not use the forum which is quite open and may not be viable for talking about sensitive parts of a software system.

Can I use it for feature requests?

No, we still urge that feature requests be posted in the forums so that others may discuss them (and because we don’t think it’s fair to charge you for suggesting cool features!). Features are still only added to products at our discretion.

How much does priority support cost?

We have priced support at $199 USD per priority support issue OR at $499 for a 5 pack of support issues, a 50% saving. You will be able to see if you have support tickets in your store account page. We have been issuing 1 priority support ticket per customer to LightSpeed 3.0 customers and upgrading Enterprise Edition customers. For other products, we’re in the process of migrating Enterprise customers to have a priority ticket added to their account.

The pricing is designed to be very cost effective and is inexpensive compared to the support options offered for other software (for example, one commercial NHibernate support vendor quotes 600 Euro, approximately $870 USD, per incident for ad hoc support).

You can purchase Priority support tickets in our online store.

Do I need it? Should I put all my requests through priority support?

If you need a guaranteed response, or a quick response is crucial to you, or you don’t want to discuss your issue on the public forum, then you should put a request through priority support. The forum will still get monitored actively by Mindscape staff and questions will be answered, but there are no guarantees around response times (our response times have usually been pretty good, but never guaranteed!).

Priority support is for those times when you need additional help and you don’t want to rely on the forums. You are welcome to simply buy a support ticket as you need them for $199 USD however it may be wiser to simply purchase a 5 pack in order to save 50%.

If I’ve missed any questions you have then please post a comment – I’m happy to answer them :-)

If you have .Net 3.5 installed and your browser supports XBAPs then you can try out all the themes right here.

The pack includes themes based on the Microsoft Office and Expression applications so your users will find them familiar and easy to use.

WPF Themes comes with documentation to help you get started quickly, and a few samples demonstrating how to apply a theme to your applications. The samples can also be used to view how the themes look on all the various controls that they support.

Plus, if you’re looking to make your own themes for your WPF applications, WPF Themes is a great way to help you get started. The themes are provided as source code, so you can simply copy whichever theme you like, and modify it to suit your needs. All the XAML files are well structured containing easily noticed comments making it easy to find the style for the control you want to see. Across all five themes, the order of the styles are kept the same which makes it easy to compare them.

WPF Themes is available to try out and buy today. Mega Pack customers will find WPF Themes available for download in the next few days.

Using WPF PropertyGrid or WPF Elements? The WPF Property Grid already includes two of these themes, and we’ll be shipping the remaining WPF Property Grid themes plus all five themes for Elements over the next few days.

If you have any queries about WPF Themes, or want help or advice with making your own themes then we would love to hear from you. Simply put a comment up on our WPF Themes support forum.
Happy styling =)

To celebrate, we’re offering a fantastic discount for everyone!

The Mindscape MegaPack contains the following per developer:

• LightSpeed Professional
• WPF Property Grid
• WPF Elements – 13 essential WPF controls
• WPF Flow Diagrams
• WPF Star Diagrams
• SimpleDB Management Tools
• All new products released by Mindscape for the duration of your subscription
• Source code (Premium edition only)
• Priority support (Premium edition only)

We offer two editions: Professional and Premium. The difference between the two is that the Premium Edition includes source code for the products as well as Priority Support.

Purchase today!

To celebrate the launch of these suites we’re offering a sale of up to 30% off the retail price of the Mega Pack editions. This stacks up to tremendous savings for you: not only will you be saving with our launch special but further saving by virtue of the packs already being a discount on purchasing individually.

The sale strictly ends at the end of Friday the 4th of September.

Mega Pack Premium: Normally $749, sale price $499 per developer
Mega Pack Professional: Normally $599, sale price $399 per developer

Don’t delay – lock in the savings and improve your development productivity today.

Questions and Answers

How much will subscription renewal cost?

Typically the renewal rates on the subscription will be approximately 40% of the retail price. This will provide an additional 12 months of benefits. If you elect not to renew you may continue to develop with the versions that were available as part of your subscription however you will not have new releases made available to you.

I’ve seen this in the store – is it really new?

We setup the Mega Pack products in the store some time ago due to the demand for all inclusive suites however we have not publicly announced or advertised the availability until now.

If you have any questions please leave a comment or contact me directly: jd@mindscape.co.nz

Take advantage of the special launch sale prices here.