TIA Portal bugs / Usability issues - will they ever fix this?

That was a good chuckle... reading through your list, I was saying to myself, "check," "check," "check"... haha.

A biggie for me is the hit-and-miss ergonomics.  E.g. keyboard shortcuts (bring on single key!!) and auto complete - too many times it fights you and you have to go through a sequence of typing, clicking away, deleting and so on just to type the thing.  I don't think they'll speed the software up any time soon, but ergonomics might be a low-hanging fruit to improve user productivity - if the software can only handle a certain rate of clicks/keystrokes, you want them to count!

Just a guess (sorry if I'm wrong) - do you do large projects without motion control?  Because my list of issues is more a long list of "when you try to do this obscure thing with that hardware that almost no one uses, it crashes"

Weekly update:

This weeks submission:
3.7: TIA installation messing up DHCP IP address renewal in windows (manual refresh using ipconfig /release & ipconfig /renew often required)

Last weeks submission status (3.1. cut & paste deleting constants):

From the response, it seems like it's a known issue. No longer present in TIA 16 and 17. Asked for bugfix backport to TIA 15.1 (since the issue was introduced during TIA 15 release cycle anyway). From the initial response I received (known issue not fixed),  I'm not sure that TIA 15.1 is still actively maintained, which is pretty sad since we do odd TIA versions only at our company (to keep the amount of simultaneously installed version needed at some sane level), and (reading the forums) TIA 17 is still very far from stable enough for serious use. 

Ideas for future submissions:

It's about time to start slowly venturing into the usability/ergonomics issues. I would like to start with my issues wit LAD editor. Ideally I would like to collect some ideas from the community to submit the best possible suggestions we could come up with (leaving the fixes to Siemens only is not a good idea in my opinion). Is anyone interested in discussing this? If so, we should probably fork it into a separate thread to keep this one clean.

I'll byte:) Bind 'esc' to cancel button and 'enter' to ok button?

(how is it possible to get that worng for so many versions...)

Weekly update:

No new SR submissions this week. Frankly, after almost month of doing this I'm getting quite discouraged. I tried to start with the true bugs first (items that should not be up to anybody's interpretation or taste), but so far I'm 0/4 (one is officially still in progress but it it's not looking good).

To summarise:

• 2.7.1 - undo history being dropped on project save
  WONTFIX. They pulled the old "it's not a bug, it's a feature" schtick. Once it's a documented, it's apparently OK. Think again.
• 3.2 Broken HMI build system
  WONTFIX / CAN'T REPRODUCE - probably didn't even make it to the devs.
• 3.1. cut & paste (including drag & drop network reordering) in the LAD editor deleting written-in constant
  TIA 15 no longer supported (even thou they introduced the bug in the update). No comment :(
• 3.7: TIA installation messing up DHCP IP address renewal in windows
  Still in progress, but they are pushing it towards the "documented behavior" explanation again. Not funny. 

With those result, I'm not very hopeful that we will be more successful once we move to the UI stuff. If you want to give it a try, here is the link to post new support request. Seeing the results and with the current workload, I will probably take a few weeks off of this. If I feel particularly inspired I might post my thoughts to further discuss some possible UI improvements, but seeing the community engagement here, this might not even be the right platform for that.

And one final observation:

Are the technical support people handling the support request getting a bonus for every SR that doesn't make it all the way to the devs? Because sometimes it definitely feels like it ... pretending not to understand English, requiring every description to be posted 3 times, explained in a different kind of language and from a different angle. Not a good experience.  

I think it is good that you bring up issues with TIA, there are many.

You should realize that they do not take the word of a one person. Especially if you are doing it your self and not behalf of a huge company. They probably know the issues already.

Also I think TIA is by far the best software in it's field. Hate to say that, but they have least amount of issues. IPC clock works, unlike one major brand, pretty basic stuff, but some cannot even get that to work. 

EDIT: Siemens's (I think every Europe based company) customer service is miles ahead of their north american competition. You can have lots of information without company account. You can download libraries as a private person, download software with test licenses. Also support request has always work for me, also free of charge.   

I'm not pro Siemens i'm just saying like it is.

Well said, things are not always as simple as they seem. Just do that, and everything is fine.

EDIT: I think that that person who started the thread has a solid experience in Windows programming. Otherwise it is just be pointless whining.

0_Einstein

If Siemens devs are using TDD (test driven development) to code TIA Portal and its many component and companion pieces of code, someone has defined the requirements, such as some IEC specification (or small piece of it as relates to specific features and tasks for coding), or some RFC (like rules for DHCP RFC 2131 / 2132) which Microsoft chooses to loosely interpret and Siemens pretty much always interprets standards strictly and as written.  At least, that's what I tend to see in their support request responses if I report something and yet it meets the standard Siemens claims it meets.

If Siemens is coding to strict standard compliance and Microsoft is coding to loosely comply with standards, you would think Microsoft would still interact properly with Siemens hardware.

However, since there are standards with which to code and test against, once the code complies with a given standard, they are not likely to change it just so it works with Microsoft's version of the standard.

To do that would take us back to the 2000's and Internet Explorer html hacks to get web pages to render the same in IE as they did in browsers that strictly followed the current standards.  You could see web pages with code that essentially said "If we are being viewed in IE, do this chunk of html, otherwise, view this chunk of html".

Thanks for your post, especially the part about the GUI interface.

Some things are really annoying. For example:

- In LADDER logic, especially with complex segments, when you modify something or just click on something, the focus is moved to a totally random location, sometimes you don't even see the selected object. In my opinion the screen should stay still, is it that difficult? it makes me kinda seasick

- when you search for something, (CTRL+F direction down) the editor finds it, and puts the found item immediately below the bottom of the screen, so that it's impossible to see it, and you always need to make that extra scroll with the mouse. Wouldn't it be better to show it somewhere near the middle of the screen? 

- screen space usage: a lot of unnecessary borders and frames take a lot of space. As you said the blocks and the interspacing are too big. there aren't many laptops with 32inch 4k monitors