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Archive for August, 2008

The Visual Studio Gallery

Tagged as General

One great resource for developers in Visual Studio land is the Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery which Microsoft setup some while back. Any developers of tools that are of use to developers in the Microsoft space can publish their tools on the gallery site and we have done just that for two of our products. Of course this makes it handy to developers to go and find tools they might otherwise not know about or get some feedback from other users on what they think of a given product.

As well as drawing attention to this site to our readers, I’d like to call on users of our products to go and rate and provide a review on the Visual Studio Gallery. I would also urge you to do the same for any other products you’ve used (for example, we rated {Smart Assembly} as it’s been a great product that has helped us in preparing our products for release. Check it out).

Check out the Mindscape products on the Visual Studio Gallery

Hope that helps and we appreciate any feedback.

John-Daniel Trask

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 28 August 2008

Mindscape at TechEd New Zealand

Tagged as General, News

Most of the Mindscape crew will be at TechEd New Zealand early next week. If you’re going to be there, please come by and say hi! Between us we’ll be doing a number of talks over the course of the conference:

Overview of SQL Server 2008 (DAT302) – Monday 2:15pm
What’s New in WPF 3.5 and 3.5 SP1 (DEV345) – Tuesday 10:45am
Architectural Considerations for ASP.NET MVC (ARC402) – Wednesday 9am
Reactive Programming (DEV375) – Wednesday 9am
Productive WCF (SOA315) – Wednesday 10:45am
Architecting Scalable Web Applications Using Velocity (ARC308) – Wednesday 12:10pm
C# Tips and Tricks (DEV486) – Wednesday 3:45pm

We’ll be around for Q&A after these so grab us then. We will also be around during the Ask the Experts evening and at CodeCamp — and of course at TechFest, though we may not be at our brightest and best. Oh, and JD will be trying to smuggle himself into the Girl Geek Dinner… we’ll see how that works out for him…

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 27 August 2008

LightSpeed Screencasts

Tagged as LightSpeed, Products

We have just started working on creating a series of screencasts to highlight how certain features of LightSpeed can be used to create better solutions. All screencasts include a download of the code used in the video, along with a SQLite database to save the hassle of needing to setup a database to start experimenting on your own.

The initial screencast is about Eager Loading with LightSpeed and we will be releasing more in the near future. I will post blog updates as they get published so subscribe if you would like to be kept up to date.

Currently planned for release soon:

Introduction to LightSpeed
Validation with LightSpeed
Schema round-tripping with the LightSpeed Designer

If there are topics you would particularly like to see or if you have any feedback then please leave a comment.

Hope that helps,

John-Daniel Trask

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 26 August 2008

What’s coming in WPF Property Grid 2.0?

Tagged as News, Products, WPF Property Grid

It’s been a few months since we shipped the first version of the WPF Property Grid, and as you’ll know if you’ve been using the nightly builds, we’ve added quite a few features in that time in response to the great customer feedback and suggestions we’ve been getting. We’re now on the point of wrapping those up into version 2.0 of the WPF Property Grid so I thought I’d jot down a few highlights.

Multiple selected objects

Sometimes it’s useful to be able to show and edit the properties of multiple objects at the same time. WPF Property Grid 2.0 supports this, showing only those properties which exist across all the objects, and showing values only where they are consistent across all the objects. Users can edit the values and thereby affect all the objects at the same time.

Custom visual styles

One of the cool features of WPF is its extensive support for styling, and version 1 of the grid included some samples of cool custom UIs for the grid. (It also included one sample of a bright orange animated UI for the grid, but the less said about that the better.) In version 2 we’re going beyond providing samples, and including three comprehensive, fully supported custom visual styles out of the box so that you can give the grid a modern, WPF-ish feel with just one line of XAML. These aren’t complete yet but here’s a quick preview of how one of them is coming along:

All editions (not just Enterprise) will include the XAML source code for these styles so you can easily use them as a starting point for your own custom styles.

Browser application (XBAP) compatible

We’ve eliminated some of the code access security requirements of version 1, so that the grid can now run in partial trust scenarios such as ClickOnce applications and XAML browser applications (XBAPs), including from the Internet zone.

Custom type descriptors and type converters

We’ve improved support for custom type descriptors (which allow you to add properties to, or remove properties from, an object) and for custom type converters (particularly around standard values).

Sorting and grouping

We’ve made it possible to set up sorting and grouping via XAML, and we’ve predefined a couple of standard sorting and grouping strategies, so that you can sort alphabetically and group by category (a la Windows Forms) without having to write any code yourself.

There’s a host of other smaller features and fixes as well, including helpers for showing a description panel, localisation improvements and type editor support for value types.

Why tell you now what’s coming up?

Firstly, as we add things to the WPF Property Grid for the 2.0 release, they become available to customers in the nightly builds. So if you’re using a recent nightly you’ve already got most of this stuff albeit in beta form.

Secondly, we hope to make potential new users aware of what they’ll be getting if they become a customer now. WPF Property Grid 2.0 will be a free upgrade for existing customers, so if you buy today you can start using these features as soon as they become available. To start working with some of these features download the latest nightly build here (or customers can download the latest nightly build of their licensed version from the store).

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 25 August 2008