Alive Beta – Live Coding in Visual Studio • Hacker News Board

axefrog wrote: post #6

jayonsoftware wrote: post #5

As a C# developer I am tempted to buy, but this paid beta thing is kind of scary

Agreed... though I imagine if you wait until full release they'll probably release a trial version.

On the faq, "All pre-order licenses are valid for one year after the release of Alive v1.0. During this time you will receive all updates, bug fixes and improvements."

So at least, there's that.

Re: Alive Beta – Live Coding in Visual Studio

#8

Post by Permit » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 10:34 PM UTC

spigoon wrote: post #4

I wonder why they went with a "paid beta" vs. a traditional free beta.

This is by far the most common question we get asked, and this weekend I'm going to write a full length blog post about that decision. What might shock you even more is that we originally charged to pre-order the alpha version.

The short version:

- We needed to quickly figure out if we were building a product that people loved and thought was worth paying for.

- We're trying to build a product a small number of people love instead of one a large number of people like.[1] If someone loves a product, we've found that they'll pay for it.

- The support issues from growing too quickly would overwhelm us.

The long version involves us offering a traditional free paid beta for our first product: http://codeconnect.io and the lessons we learned from that experience.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Re: Alive Beta – Live Coding in Visual Studio

#9

Post by Permit » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 10:40 PM UTC

jayonsoftware wrote: post #5

As a C# developer I am tempted to buy, but this paid beta thing is kind of scary

Completely understandable. Another individual on Reddit made the same comment.

As programmers, I think we're naturally skeptical of new projects (especially ones that seem to come out of nowhere). This is doubly true when we're asked to pay for something and we can't even try it. We've all heard Kickstarter horror stories and can point to some sort of vaporware that let us down.

Here's a testimonial from Chris Sells (one of six "Microsoft Software Legends" and the author of a number of books on C#): https://twitter.com/csells/status/606141631054540800

Let me know if there's anything more you'd like to know about Alive or the team behind it.

Re: Alive Beta – Live Coding in Visual Studio

#10

Post by aesthetics1 » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 11:24 PM UTC

Are there some more in-depth demo videos? I'd love to see how/whether it is able to interact with databases, for example. Can I see records directly in my code?

Looks like a neat tool.