Red Gate & Reflector: My Concerns...

Jay Kimble — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:22:20 GMT

Ok, before I start off I want to note that Red Gate is one of our "Friends of TRT," so they show up on just about every page of the site (and would appear in every RSS if I had the time to figure out how to do it). I also want to note that I know that I am breaking a rule with this post and may alienate a vendor, but this needs to be said (and sometimes I can’t resist).

I love Red Gate tools. Their commercial stuff is absolutely awesome, and I mean that. If you don’t own at least their SQL Data/Compare tools, then you should. Their software engineering is without much fault (as far as I have seen). I love how they help the community (hence they are in our "Friends" program).

I was chatting with JP (John Papa) when I caught the news in the latest bulletin from them (it might have been old), and went from casual talk about John’s skin on his blog (see here) to "Crap! Red Gate just bought Reflector..." JP doesn’t necessarily agree with me, but I wanted to at least spit out what I’m bugged by.

Red Gate also owns the PInvoke.net addin for VS2005 (and maybe it now works with VS2008). When you click on the web site to get the addin you are prompted for an email address and are informed that you will be getting ANTS Profiler 3 and Exception Hunter 1 as well... so they bundled 2 trials with a free product... products that you may already have licenses to.

Not only that but every couple days you start getting spammed by their marketing department (it’s one of those... 2 days, 5 days, 1.5 weeks, 3 weeks, and after about a month they finally leave you alone). The bigger problem is that they don’t check their DB to see if you are already a registered licensee of a product (beyond the fact that you went there for a FREE PRODUCT).

So everyone is wondering if .NET Reflector will continue to be free. I know that it will... It will just be bundled with some stuff that you may or may not want... and then you’ll be marketed to for a couple weeks after... That would be my big complaint. I hope that they choose to do otherwise (right now you can still download just .NET Reflector... but the marketing guys haven’t had time yet to figure out what they want to do... so we’ll see what happens).

BTW, I hope I’m wrong about all this ... I really do. Red Gate is a company I really do like (I just don’t always like the way they have handled "free" products in the past)... I hope they continue to have a single download to the free product.

Open Source

Red Gate & Reflector: My Concerns...