[TRNSYS-users] Problem with IISiBat

[Jeff Thornton]

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" do
>not 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

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Thermal Energy System Specialists (TESS)
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