Changes of note are:

• Updated IcedCoffeeScript to 1.6.2
• Improve parsing to support cases where whitespace is allowed at the beginning of a parenthesised list
• Improved handling of nested directives within the Sass and Less parsers
• Improve parsing to support @charset directive in .scss files
• Improve parsing to support bang directives after interpolated variable references
• Included FSharp.Core as part of command line compiler to handle cases where this is not natively installed

Ribbon control

The main new control in this version is the Ribbon control. A lot of users will be familiar with this control as the command hub that sits at the top of Microsoft Office applications. This control is a replacement for the Menu control and is used to categorize application commands and display them nicely to the user. Out of the box, this control supports a lot of WPF Controls including buttons, check boxes, comboboxes, numeric controls, split buttons and more. Based on the available screen real-estate, the Ribbon control will select a small, medium or large state for each control and arrange them in an optimal way. If there isn’t enough space, groups of controls will bubble down into expandable segments so the user still has access to everything.

Included with the Ribbon control is the Gallery control which is like a Ribbon-friendly list box. Items are displayed in horizontal rows and can be navigated through with smooth animations. The user can expand the whole list of items in a popup where items can be optionally categorized. Gallery controls can either be placed directly within the Ribbon control, or within the dropdown part of a split button.

A demo called “Text Formatter” is included with WPF Elements 6.0 which demonstrates all the features of the Ribbon control.

Improved DateTime axis support

Since version 1 of the Chart control, there has always been support for displaying DateTime values along the axes. The axes automatically space out the tick marks and labels which works well for numbers, but could be better for DateTime values. In WPF Elements 6.0 the axes logic for DateTime values is much improved. Labels will now be separated by proper time units rather than seemingly random intervals. For example, based on the current time range on the axis, the labels could be separated by 5 minutes, or 12 hours, or 2 days or 3 months etc. The interesting one here is monthly intervals because each month has a different number of days. The labels and tick mark spacings will be physically different to support this making the axis labels very easy to read.

Accurate data rendering.

The Chart control can handle millions of data points at once while maintaining good responsiveness. One of the ways it does this is by skipping over some of the data points so that only a few hundred points need to be rendered at once. As you zoom in, less points are skipped over so all the data can still be viewed. By default, the Chart control skips over of a constant number of data points per render. For example, the Chart may render every 10th point. This works well, but it can potentially skip extreme outlying data points and not capture an accurate shape of the data. In version 6.0 we include the IsMinMaxSamplingEnabled property on data series which when set to true will sacrifice a small amount of performance to render more accurate data. This is ideal for data that has sudden changes in the trend or outlying values. Here is a before and after shot of a trigonometry equation containing an extreme amount of spikes. For this kind of data there is a huge improvement with using this feature.

There are heaps of other additions that I’d love to tell you about but can’t fit into this blog post. For the full list, check out the Getting Started/What’s New page in the documentation that is shipped with the product. You can also see a simplified list of what’s new right here.

If you’re already a WPF Elements customer, you can upgrade to version 6.0 for free by going to your account page. If not, download the free 30 day trial to see what you’re missing out on. If you have any questions about WPF Elements, let us know in the forum. We’d also love to hear any feature requests you have.

What’s great about C# Smorgasbord?

Filip states that the book is great for beginners through to advanced developers. What we like is the more advanced end of the book. There’s plenty of ‘Learn C# in 45 seconds’ style guides out there but sometimes it can be difficult to find a more meaty read. Filip delivers some great content for professional developers.

Here’s an example of some of the chapters:

• Chapter 1 covers Parallel Extensions
• Chapter 5 covers async programming with varying approaches
• Chapter 9 discusses Microsoft IL language in an easy manner and is great for embracing what’s happening under the covers of the C# compiler
• Chapter 10 looks at the Roslyn CTP, a technology we’ve covered on our blog here before

Getting yourself a copy

Now, you could go out and buy a copy right now from Amazon (it’s worth it), or you could get a free copy from us!

Here’s how to win a free copy:

• Sign up for a free trial of Raygun.
• Integrate Raygun with your software – you must be sending data into Raygun to qualify.
• Once you have errors flowing into Raygun, tweet your favourite feature of raygun with the hashtag #raygunio.

We will select the first 50 users who do this and send you out a copy of Filip’s great book. You also need to meet the terms. Speaking of which…

The terms

1. Limited to 50 books
2. You must complete all three steps to qualify for entry.
3. You must integrate Raygun into a proper software product – no throw away or test applications just to gain entry! :-) We can see the activity of errors flowing into your Raygun account.
4. The competition will run until April 20th 2013 or until all books have been won – whichever comes first.
5. Mindscape reserves the right to cancel the competition at any time and void invalid entries.
6. If Filip’s book is not available or cannot be shipped to you by Amazon we will provide a gift voucher of the same value.

Get going!

What are you waiting for? It takes minutes to integrate Raygun, you’ll get a great book for free and your software will be rock solid for years to come thanks to Raygun helping with your error reporting!

The day has finally arrived and we’re excited to announce LightSpeed 5. The worlds best .NET ORM just got even better!

Here’s a run down on some of the best improvements. Keep in mind that the change log for LightSpeed is the longest we’ve ever had so these are just the highlights — there is awesomeness sprinkled everywhere.

Compiled Queries

LightSpeed already had one of the fastest query generation processes of any .NET ORM but now we support Compiled Queries also. Compiled Queries mean that we can side step the cost of query generation almost entirely on subsequent queries where only variables change (e.g. ‘SELECT name FROM user WHERE Id = {ID}’).

Lets take a peek at how this compares between LightSpeed 4 and LightSpeed 5

Pretty impressive! 59% performance improvement in simple queries.

Of course LightSpeed has always been pretty impressive compared to what’s out there. Here’s those same numbers in comparison to Entity Framework.

You can see why software professionals pick LightSpeed. It’s not just significantly more efficient in querying, but it is also a lot easier to use and saves you valuable development hours (the many hours saved not shown in the graphs!)

Automatic compiled queries

Compiled queries are a cool new addition. You know what else is cool? When they get applied automatically! We’ve made sure that if you call FindById, for example, LightSpeed will internally create a compiled query so all your fetches by Id automatically go faster.

Along with automatically occurring with FindById, LightSpeed will use this technique when walking lazy loaded collections (e.g. User.Posts would use a compiled query). This means when you’re doing simple things like walking collections you’re going at maximum speed.

More speed, automatically!

First class SQL 2012 support

We’ve included a new SQL Server 2012 data provider. This is great because we already had support for all the modern data types like SQLGeography, HierarchyID and CLR Types and now you can use LightSpeed to natively target SQL Server 2012 including leveraging the new SEQUENCE support for identity generation.

More friendly design surface

The LightSpeed Designer has been improved to help new users. It will now do nice things like offer to create a KeyTable for you if you don’t have one setup but are using the KeyTable identity type. A common speed bump for new users that we wanted to clear up.

You can also display table data for a given entity directly within Visual Studio. This helps avoid needing to fire up SQL Management Studio or other tool to see your data.

For those of you who have not worked with a Visual Studio integrated designer that doesn’t suck, you’ll find the LightSpeed Designer a breath of fresh air. It has database-first and model-first design support, smart filtering, works with a bunch of different databases and much more. You can read more about designer specific features here.

There are several other improvements to make the designer more robust, provide better error messages and improve database syncing.

Grab it now!

You’ll love how easy LightSpeed is to use and won’t look back. If you’ve never used LightSpeed you can grab the forever free version and give it a test drive!

Existing customers with active subscriptions already have LightSpeed 5 available from their accounts.

To try out our newest product for tracking and fixing errors - Raygun.io!

Sign up for a FREE 30 day trial, and find out how Raygun makes error collecting, reporting and management automatic and easy.

Then, if you blog about your experience with Raygun (and your honest experience at that), we’d love to send you your very own Raygun T-shirt (anywhere in the world).

Like these cool dudes are wearing!

I’m an error blasting machine.

So if you would like to do a blog review of your experience with the mighty Raygun, sign up here for your free trial, and email hilary@mindscape.co.nz to grab one of these rad T-shirts while we still have ‘em!

LightSpeed

• Suppress code gen of LINQ IQueryable for transient entities
• Fix issue for C# templates with association fields being marked private when derived types are present, should be protected in these cases
• Fix for issue with delete cascading of an entity where it was associated with the base entity in a CTI relationship

Web Workbench

• Fix for an issue with invalid warnings being emitted regarding missing folders on save
• Updated CoffeeScript to 1.5
• Added support for Literate CoffeeScript
• Added an option to suppress warnings about missing folders to Web Workbench options
• Updated the Visual Studio Gallery

WPF Diagrams

• Resolved a connection point placement issue caused by deserializing a rotated node.
  (details)

WPF Elements

• Resolved a DataGrid auto column size bug.
  (details)
• Resolved a bug caused by using Snoop to debug the DataGrid.
  (details)
• Resolved a bug calculating the extent of the DataGrid.
  (details)
• Resolved an edge case issue in a DataGrid with 1 column and FrozenColumnCount = 1.
  (details)
• Resolved an exception when dragging the DataGrid padding column header.
  (details)
• Added Minor and MajorRangeButtonsVisibility properties to the TimeExplorer.
  (details)
• Resolved a DataGridPager bug.
  (details)
• Resolved a bug in LineAreaSeriesBase.GetY when the data includes null points.
  (details)

As usual the free editions of the nightly builds are available right now from the downloads page, and the full editions from the store.

This week I’m pleased to announce a range of new error reporting providers for Raygun.io — to compliment our existing .NET, WinRT, NancyFX and PHP providers. We now also have providers for Java, JavaScript, ColdFusion and a community contributed Ruby provider.

JavaScript provider

The JavaScript provider integrates into web apps and reports on errors that occur on the client side of your web application. These errors are typically hidden from you, the developer, because you have no visibility of them from the server. The downside is that they can majorly damage the user experience of your application given the rise of JavaScript use in recent years.

The JavaScript provider is ready for you to use but is just a start. JavaScript error reporting support in browsers is, how do we say this nicely, “pretty average”, but we do as reasonable job of reporting what we can. This includes the URL, the message and if the browser supports it, a stack trace. We have plans to improve upon this further with time and appreciate your feedback on the provider as it stands now.

Read more about reporting JavaScript errors to Raygun.io here.

Java provider

Callum on our team has been busy working on adding support for Java applications. We’ve got specific support for Servlets, JSP’s and standard exception reporting. We’ve also had good community response on adding additional support to other parts of Java.

Read more about reporting Java errors to Raygun.io here.

Ruby provider

We have fairly substantial plans for a Ruby provider for Raygun. Justin McNally (github, twitter), an all round nice guy and not affiliated with us at all, couldn’t wait and dived in and wrote a nice light weight provider for Ruby. His contribution can be found on GitHub over here. He’s been using it in his organisation successfully. We’ll be working with Justin to include his efforts with our own and are happy to support folks working with the Ruby provider.

Read more about Justin’s Ruby error provider for Raygun.io here.

ColdFusion provider

Another all round good guy, Kai Koenig (github, twitter), has developed a provider for ColdFusion. He’s put the provider up on GitHub and has offered to maintain that provider. If you’re a ColdFusion developer he’s happy for you to submit things on Github.

Read more about reporting ColdFusion errors to Raygun.io here.

The REST API for submitting an error

We’ve recently published the first cut of our public API for reporting exceptions. This lets you build your own providers for other platforms. We’ve even had people writing specific providers for applications, like Alex Henderson building a plugin for the very cool Enterprise Tester software testing product.

You can read more about the REST API here.

Thanks!

We love that the community has rallied behind Raygun in the month since we launched. We have plans for more providers (Python is not far away!) and can’t wait to see the cool things you produce. Let us know at hello@raygun.io as it would be great to profile your creations.

If you haven’t added Raygun.io error tracking to your app yet, you can get your free trial here.

Happy coding!

As a lot of you will know, we’ve made 2 exciting releases recently: Raygun.io and Metro Elements.

Raygun.io is our error tracking service that you can integrate into your apps using a few lines of code. When exceptions occur in your app, the details are sent to the Raygun.io service which you can view in the convenient dashboard. The dashboard groups the exceptions together so that you can easily see the unique exceptions that are being raised. It also has a smart email notification system. You’ll get enough emails to know what’s going on with your apps, but not so much that it clutters your inbox. Raygun.io has providers for ASP.NET, PHP, WPF and WinRT plus many more currently under development.

Metro Elements is our suite of controls for WinRT app development. Metro Elements includes a sample explorer app that shows off all the controls in action. This app has been published on the Windows Store which is what I’ll be talking about today.

Make Windows Store submission easier with Raygun.io

In the Metro Elements Sample Explorer, I integrated Raygun.io so we can track and fix exceptions if they occur. Doing this ended up having a helpful consequence we hadn’t though of: While submitting the sample explorer app to the store, the Microsoft testers managed to crash the application in a scenario we had overlooked. This exception got instantly logged into the Raygun.io dashboard for the Sample Explorer. Using the stack trace and the type of exception, I was able to reproduce and solve the bug in a few minutes. Half an hour later, the Microsoft testers had finished looking through the app and I got an email saying that it failed because the application crashed. No problem – as Raygun.io already helped me resolve the issue, I simply submitted the updated package again which later passed certification and was published on the Windows Store.

Not only did Raygun.io help save time by sending an error report before the certification even failed, but the way Raygun.io presents the exception data is far easier to interpret than the error dump that you get in the failed certification report. Are you submitting an app the Windows Store? Get Raygun.io – it’s a no-brainer.

If you’re a WinRT app developer, you can check out the free Metro Elements Sample Explorer from here. More information about the actual control suite is found on the website.

We’d love to hear about your experiences with Raygun.io, let us know by writing a comment on this blog.

I’m very excited to announce the general availability of Raygun.io – the best way to record, track and manage errors in your applications!

Raygun is a cloud service that records all your software errors, including a lot of information to help with diagnosing the problems. Let’s dive in and see if Raygun could be right for you.

Do any of these ring a bell?

• I don’t log any exceptions but I know I should.
• I log exceptions to a file but I only look at them when somebody complains.
• I email myself every exception but, honestly, I mostly ignore them now as many are junk.
• Alex gets the error emails but he’s on holiday this week.
• I’m pretty sure Jim was being emailed errors but he left the company three months ago.

How will Raygun make your job easier?

• You get a beautiful dashboard showing the overall health and trends in your software
• We group similar errors so you’re only working with unique errors
• We don’t email on every error – only on new sightings, re-occurrence rate changes and threshold changes. Simply put, a manageable number of notifications that you can absolutely turn off if you’d rather check the site only.
• Raygun records a lot of data about every error. This makes resolving errors easier than ever.
• Permanently ignore junk exceptions (like those caused by spam bots or broken web crawlers) so you never see or hear from them again
• Simple workflow for resolving, ignoring or permanently ignoring an error group.

These features have been designed to help reduce notification overload and reduce your time to resolve an error.

Raygun is great for teams too!

All Raygun accounts, from the smallest to the largest, can have an unlimited number of users associated with it.

Raygun also supports multiple applications per account so you can easily track every moving part of your software easily.

Supported Platforms

At present we have support for .NET, WinRT, NancyFX and PHP. You integrate a small component into your software and set an API key and you’re good to go!

Support for Ruby, JavaScript, Objective-C, Java and Cold Fusion is coming soon and already under development. If you’d like to get early access to these providers email us at hello@raygun.io.

A rock solid choice

Application errors can be costing you time and money due to lost sales. We have a team dedicated to the development of Raygun and are already processing millions of application errors every day. Whatever the size of your application and needs we can support you.

Be up and running in the next 10 minutes!

Setting up Raygun doesn’t take long at all. Standard integration time is measured in minutes and you can be logging errors quickly.

All accounts include 30 days free trial of our largest plan so you can see how much better zapping errors can be!

LightSpeed

• Add constructor which allows user to specify the list of stop words used by the Lucene analyzer

Web Workbench

• Intelliense for Less mixins is now correctly triggered when in a CSS property context

WPF Diagrams

• Added DiagramConnectionPointBase.HasConnections property
  (details)
• The drag-panning user operation now respects the AllowInfiniteScroll property.
  (details)
• Resolved a diagram scrolling bug.
  (details)
• Resolved a critical selection bug.
  (details)

WPF Elements

• Resolved a rendering bug in the DataGrid caused by changing the visibility while a custom cell has focus.
  (details)
• Added DataGrid.AutoColumnWidthBehavior property.
  (details)
• Resolved a minor charting selection bug.
  (details)
• Added Chart.CanToggleSelection property.
  (details)
• Added Chart.CanDeselectOnClickNothing property.
  (details)
• Added Chart.IsRightClickSelectionEnabled property.
  (details)
• Resolved a DataGrid auto column width issue.
  (details)
• Added DataGridColumn.MaxAutoWidth property.
  (details)
• Added DataGrid.CanAutoSizeColumnHeaders property.
  (details)
• DataPoint selection logic now respects the IsRightClickSelectionEnabled and CanToggleSelection properties.
  (details)

As usual the free editions of the nightly builds are available right now from the downloads page, and the full editions from the store.