Neil,

Cassini simply reports occurrences of the product being installed or uninstalled in the format of <SKU>Inc(redment)/Dec(rement). As you noted, nothing else is being sent - no cookies, nothing. This little anonymous ping lets us know which product is more important to the community. For example, when we started writing Cassini, ASP.NET 2.0 was just being introduced and we thought that people were mostly interested in ASP.NET 1.1 support, and added 2.0 just in case when 1.1 product was almost ready for release. Boy, were we wrong! Thanks to these pings we found out that ASP.NET 2.0 product was twice as popular in the beginning and is about five times more popular than 1.1 now. This, in turn, let's us think strategically and consider whether we need to keep 2.0 and 1.1 products on the same release schedule and keep the same feature set. May be yes for another year, but after that we may create another version of Cassini 2.0 based on HTTP.SYS, which will be closer to IIS in functionality than to Cassini. But that will only be possible with reliable information on what people really need.

Please help your customers to understand that since we give away Cassini for free, the information about products being installed and removed eventually help only people who use it as developers and end users. You may have never gotten this product and the set of features if we didn't have this little feature. We can also tell that people are mostly happy with the product because about 80% of installed product instaces were kept. The ping will be our first alarm bell if we see the satisfaction level start slipping.

The bottom line is that this ping is not something you give with getting nothing for it. The value of the ping comes back to you and your customers a few months later in the form of the another strong and reliable release of the product.

In case your customers have problem with the ping anyway, you could redirect the call to the dead end by programmatically modifying "hosts" file with bogus IP assigned to crm.ultidev.com. This won't make Cassini installation fail and will not send the ping out either.

Please let us know what you think.

Best regards,
UltiDev Team.

Neil,

Thank you for kind words about the product. We are very happy you like it.

Of course we don't know how many times you or your clients have installed and removed the product - the information ping sends back is not traceable to specific people. We just know day's and overall SKU's grand tally of installs.

Regarding asking people for more information at registration time - it's very hard. People assume we will spam them or sell their information - neither of which we do. Besides, people who download the product - the developers - constitute a small fraction of the install base because most of product installations come from applications bundled with our Cassini. It is unlikely we will remove ping home in the next release, but we will think of what can we do to accommodate software vendors who absolutely must have ping home disabled. We will work to come up with the on-request workaround for the issue.

Best regards,
UltiDev Team.

Neil,

of course you are right - IP addresses are known whenever you get an HTTP request and web servers are recording them in their logs. That information can be mined out of the logs fairly easily. The argument could be made that as long as logging feature is on by default on web servers, the real anonymity on Internet is not achievable. May be it's another reason to get UltiDev Cassini - it does not have logging functionality (yet).

Best regards,
UltiDev Team.