In this example I am dragging the floating window by using the caption bar and then hovering over the top drop indicator for the target docking control. The light blue rectangle at the top of the docking control shows the relative position of the content when it is added using this indicator. On releasing the mouse we get the following result.

Because each docking control is actually a KryptonWorkspace it means we can organize the content pages in any way we wish. To show this I then dragged Page 1 and Page 2 in order to create a more complicated layout that might not be very useful in practice.

The user can create whatever arrangement they like. This also applies to floating windows as the client area of the floating window is also derived from KryptonWorkspace. If you have multiple monitors then this allows you to make the best use of the screen real estate. Create a floating window per extra monitor, maximize each floating window and then use drag and drop to organize content as needed. This would allow your application to be used on 2, 3 or more monitors and really get the best use of that space.

The Close and Auto Hide options are just alternate ways of performing the same actions as the pin and close buttons  that were already described in the last post. Float and Dock options are fairly obvious and switch the individual page between being a floating window and docked back again against a control edge. Tabbed Document is used to move the page into the filler control that occupies the client area of the control. Under VS2010 this means the page is moved to the editing area so you can see that page alongside code editing or design surface windows. If we select the above Float option we get the following modeless windows appear…

You probably think the window looks a little odd. Under VS2010 the appearance and operation of the window has changed to make it easier to use docking windows on multi-monitor machines. If you double click the window caption in VS2008 it would restore the contents back to be docked windows. With VS2010 and Krypton Docking it maximizes the window. This allows you to place several pages inside the floating window and then maximize it on a different monitor in order to make use of multiple monitors effectively.

When pressed you get the expected group on the left edge of the form.

Move the mouse over the auto hidden tab and after a short delay it will slide out so it overlaps the client area. It operates like the Visual Studio environment where moving the mouse away from the area causes it to slide back again.

Now onto floating pages and the ability to restore back to where they came from.

To help me out I needed to add some new events, methods and properties to the workspace and navigator controls. I thought you might find some of these handy for y0ur own applications so here is a quick summary…

KryptonWorkspace
   Methods
      HideAllPages()
      ShowAllPages()
      FirstVisibleCell()
      NextVisibleCell(…)
      PreviousVisibleCell(…)
      LastVisibleCell()
      IsCellPresent(…)
      PageForUniqueName(…)
      CellForUniqueName(…)
   Properties
      CellVisibleCount
   Events
      CellCountChanged
      CellVisibleCountChanged

KryptonNavigator
   Methods
      HideAllPages()
      ShowAllPages()
   Properties
      AllowTabSelect
      Bar.BarLastItemInset
   Events
      TabCountChanged
      TabVisibleCountChanged
      TabMouseHoverStart
      TabMouseHoverEnd

Imagine you have a Panel somewhere in your application and you add a Button onto that Panel. Set the Button.Visible to be False and then back again to True. It works exactly as you would expect by hiding the control and then displaying it again.

Now move up a level and try setting the Panel.Visible to be False so the whole Panel, including the contained Button, is hidden away. Whilst hidden try asking for the Button.Visible value and you will see it comes back with False! This is bad because it’s clearly returning a value indicating if the Button is currently visible rather than a value indicating if the Button would like to be visible. There is a big difference between those two semantics.

This problem becomes evident when you want to create your own custom layout panel. Your custom control will need to scan the set of child controls and decide how to arrange them. To make your control behave itself you want to honor the visible setting of child controls. But your stuck because asking a child control for its visible property will not always give the correct answer. If your control performs a layout when it happens to be hidden then all the children will automatically say they want to be hidden as well. Not because they really want to be invisible but purely because at the time the child control was asked the parent chain had a control that was not currently visible.

What we really need is two properties. The Control.Visible should act as an indication of the visible state the control would like to have. So the ‘get’ should return the same value as the last ’set’. Then a new property called Control.CurrentlyVisible that returns if the control is currently visible based on the state of all the parent controls up the chain of controls up to and including the owning Form.

This is something I have had to get around for the KryptonNavigator and KryptonWorkspace controls because they suffer from exactly this issue. They both have child collections of controls and need to honor the visible state of those controls. Luckily I can get around it because they can only have child controls of a type I have defined. So I can easily add the extra properties needed to those defined types. But this would fail if my collection could take any arbitrary control and not just my own types.

As the user moves the mouse over the control it changes the mouse cursor to indicate that it provides splitter functionality. If you press the mouse and start dragging then you see feedback drawn over the application that shows what change will occur if you release the mouse. Here you can see the visual feedback as a drag occurs…

The KryptonSeparator does not actually do anything when you release the mouse at the end of the drag as there is no way for the control to know what other controls should be resized and positioned. Instead it generates events that you can monitor and once the drag ends you use that event to decide what action to take.

I have added HeaderBarTabGroup as a new navigator mode that displays two headers around the edge of the tab headers area. As with all the header modes the buttons are placed inside the primary header instead of inside the tab bar. Switching to the new mode we get the following…

To replicate the Visual Studio 2008 docking windows we need to remove the secondary header and change the tabs orientation so they appear at the bottom. We can do that by changing a couple of existing properties. For this example I have removed the display of the context button so we have just a close button showing…

Now we have the correct layout we need to add some new palette styles so the appearance can be customized for just the docking scenario. Two new header styles called HeaderDockActive and HeaderDockInactive allow the header to indicate the active state of the navigator. The next two images show the header in each of the two styles.

Also added are a new TabBorderStyle called Dock and a tab style of Dock that allow the shape and appearance of the tabs to be defined specifically for the docking scenario. These changes give the final look and feel as follows for the Office 2007 - Blue palette…

Once I get to write the docking code there will be an event that is fired whenever a navigator is created. Just before the event is fired the navigator will be customized so it looks as seen above. But you will be able to hook into that event and alter the appearance to whatever you prefer instead. For example, you might decide to have a stacking buttons style instead. Allowing easy customization of appearance and operation are a key goal of the docking windows system.

To celebrate the release of Krypton Suite 3.5 we are offering a 25% sale on all prices for April. Combine this with our 60 day money back guarantee and you would be mad not to give Krypton a try out.

Use Krypton to build WinForms applications with the latest look and feel including the Office 2007 and Windows Media Player themes.

See our 25% off prices…
Prices Page

Download Krypton Suite…
KryptonSuite352.zip

Right clicking on the Workstation tab header shows a context menu with a new Maximize option.

Selecting the option gives the following maximized layout with all but the maximized cell hidden from view.

Right click the tab header again and you will find the Maximize option has changed to become Restore instead. Keyboard users can use the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + M combination to toggle between maximized and restored.

In the examples above you can see a ButtonSpec that I added with appropriate images that allows an easier method of switching without requiring the user to discover the feature by looking at the context menu. This ButtonSpec is not added by the workspace and so if you want the same ability you will need to add it manually just as I did. You can see the new Cell Maximize + Restore sample to discover the few lines of code needed to add this capability.

Double Clicking Tabs
I’ve also added a new event to the KryptonNavigator called TabDoubleClicked which is fired whenever the user double clicks with the left mouse button on the tab header. In my new sample this is used to toggle the maximzed state but you could use this as a trigger for any default action you would like to perform.

Persistence Formats
Use SaveLayoutToFile and LoadLayoutFromFile in order to persist to/from a file. The actual contents of the file will be an XML document but you can ignore this as modifying the contents risks making it invalid. Alternatively use the SaveLayoutToArray and LoadLayoutFromArray methods to deal with arrays of bytes. An array of bytes makes it easy to save the data into a database and so associate the layout with user’s details. Or you could convert the array of bytes into a Base64 string and include it into your own applications persistence mechanism.

There are two other formats for those needing even more options. SaveLayoutToXml and LoadLayoutFromXml use references to instances of XmlTextWriter and XmlTextReader classes respectively. So if you are already using these two classes for streaming your own data you can call into these methods and have the layout data inserted into your own XML data. Finally th SaveLayoutToStream and LoadLayoutFromStream are the most flexible and allow you to supply any Stream derived class.

Persisted Information
The hierarchy of the layout is saved starting with the Root sequence of the control. Each workspace sequence and cell is saved along with the details needed to recreate that item. Each cell can contain any number of individual KryptonPage instances, so details about each page are also saved including most, but not all, of the properties of the page. You should assume that everything about the page is saved except for two types of information. The actual set of child controls that exist on the page are not persisted and neither are the modified values of the State properties. We can see the implications of this by looking at the two likely scenarios for usage.

In the static scenario the set of pages in the workspace are going to be fixed and so every time you run your application the pages are identical. This is the easiest situation to handle.  Reloading is only expected to result in the repositioning of pages into a new layout but not cause the creation or removal of pages. You do not need to write any additional code to handle this scenario and simply calling the Save/Load methods will perform this default behavior. This is because when a page is loaded the control attempts to lookup the named page in the existing set of pages. If found it simply uses that existing page. In this static scenario the loading page will always be found and so reused.

In a dynamic scenario the set of pages could be different every time the application is run. Here you would be creating new pages depending on the users actions. Now when you load a layout you are likely to find that none of the existing pages match those being loaded. When a loading page does not match any of the existing ones then it creates a new page instance and updates the page with the loading data. Once the loading is complete it will remove any pages that are no longer required. This scenario does require you to write some additional code because the child controls on a page need to be created by the developer and are not persisted by the workspace control. Hook into the PageLoading event which is called each time a page is loaded and add the child controls as appropriate for that page (more on this below).

Customization Events
It is very likely you will want to save some additional application specific information along with the automatically generated content. To allow this use the GlobalSaving and GlobalLoading events to persist whatever arbitrary data you like. Use the PageLoading and PageSaving to persist custom data on a per-page basis.

As noted above, the PageLoading is the event used to not just recover custom data but also allow you to modify the page instance before it is used. If you have pages being created then this is where you would add the appropriate child controls and perform whatever data binding etc might be required. You can go even futher than that and assign a new page instance to the returned event data so that your assigned page is used in place of the original. It will probably be easier to create a new page in your event handler than try to customize the page provided by adding the child controls in code. Note you could assign null to the returned event data and so prevent a page being added at all. This is the technique needed to prevent a loading page from being added to the workspace, effectively ensuring the loading page is ignored as no longer required.

Our final event is fired at the end of the loading process and called PagesUnmatched. This event provides you with a list of pages that were present before the load started but were not matched with any loaded page. By default, if you do nothing then those unmatched pages will be deleted from the workspace. Hook this event if you need to examine that list of unmatched pages and instead use code to add them into the workspace again so they are not removed.

I have added a new workspace demo that shows per-page custom data being added to the persisted information so that you can see in code how easy it is.

Being from the UK I often read the BBC News website and spotted this graph that really puts it into perspective. It shows a comparison between the current downturn and the recessions in 1980 and 1990. Keep in mind these figures are for the UK only.

We can clearly see that the red line is marching downwards without any sign yet of turning. The recession is already much worse than that of the 1990’s and seems to be matching that of the 1980’s. Obviously no one knows when it will actually turn but lets assume it matches the 1980’s recession. In that case we can expect all of 2009 to consist of negative growth. Starting in 2010 we could see growth return but it would still take another two years for output to reach pre-recession levels.

If however, the red line keeps going past the 1980’s level then we can expect even more than 3 years before the economy is back in reasonably good shape. That means we will be telling our kids about the Great Recession.

But we need to take care before becoming as depressed as the economists. This recession is going to split people into two groups. If you’re laid off then things are going to be pretty rough for quite a long time. But remember that 90% of people will not lose their job. That means 90% of households are paying much lower interest rates of their mortgage and if you need to replace your car then now is the best time of your life. So most people will have the chance to emerge from the downturn in a much better financial position than when they entered it. I hope that that most of us fit into that category.

Download 3.5.2

Download 3.5.1

When thinking about future development plans you need to take technical as well as the market demands into account. We know that WinForms is no longer being actively developed by Microsoft and so the a long slow decline in sales of WinForms components can be expected. WPF is the new desktop story with little brother Silverlight being heavily pushed for RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Does that mean all WinForms development is now a waste of time? Should I stop developing WinForms components/controls immediately?

Far from it, just think of the existing WinForms installed base as well as the huge number of .NET developers that have achieved technical competence in that technology. Few companies can afford to rewrite applications in WPF just because it’s now flavor of the month. Besides, when it comes to line of business applications WinForms is perfectly acceptable. No doubt WPF will become more and more compelling for new projects but it has yet to become de facto for new desktop apps.

We can use the handy Good Trends service to check out the relative popularity of different keywords. If we assume there is some rough correlation between keyword searching and actual technology usage we get the following…

We can see the WPF trend moving steadily upwards as WinForms usage switches over. More interesting is the Silverlight trend. Despite being the new kid on the block we can see it’s already very popular and the upward trend is much steeper than for WPF. Of the two technologies it seems that Silverlight is where the interest and action is going to be.
Silverlight vs Flash

As Silverlight is judged to be in competition to Flash, whether Microsoft choose to admit it or not, it might be handy to compare them. Doing so gives us the following rather sobering graph…

Clearly Silverlight is not going to replace Flash in the immediate future. Then again any new technology for developing rich sites is always going to be in a minority for many years to come. I cannot imagine Facebook, MySpace, New York Times etc becoming Flash/Silverlight. I can see that any small startup is going to be tempted by the ease of outputting simple HTML pages rather than building an RIA as the first iteration. So maybe RIA is destined to be limited to business applications and niche areas.
Silverlight vs Adobe Flex

A fairer comparison might be Silverlight and the Adobe Flex environment as that truly represents the actual development competition. In that case things look a little brighter…

Things are pretty even here and it could be some time before a clear leader emerges.
Conclusion

As a component vendor what strategy can be we take away from this? First of all I think there is still some mileage in WinForms for two reasons. First is the large installed base and existing knowledge base that means many projects will continue to use it for many years to come. Second is the advantage of being a small one man vendor. A legacy development base would still provide enough income to make a respectable living for a lone wolf like myself, although it only represents executive wash room costs for the big vendors. So I intend to be actively developing Krypton for some time yet. Indeed my next major burst of coding will be adding the much delayed docking windows capability.

Long term I still need to get involved in the Silverlight/WPF market. From the above analysis it seems that targeting Silverlight should be the priority. The fact WPF uses essentially the same framework means that with care the same code base could be used to create WPF versions of the same components. I will use my limited spare time to play around with Silverlight and think about ideas for components that would add value for RIA scenarios.

Although the sale started on the 1st April I decided to wait until the 2nd before adding a blog entry. I didn’t want people to think it was some sort of twisted April Fool’s Joke. I will post a forum message and notify my list of email subscribers in order to spread the message far and wide. I suspect the email list is where most extra sales will come from, if there are any, as it represents a large pool of developers that have not bought but expressed an interest at some point in the past

In order to make this work I need to increase the number of orders by 33% in order to cover the fact each sales is worth 25% less. Anything above 33% represents an actually benefit from having a sale. I will let you know at the end of the month how it works out.

It seems that everyone is getting into a lather about the newly introduced Intel X25-M SSD. Although still expensive at $400 for 80GB ($800 for 160GB) it does at least solve the slow speed and low capacity complaints. But just how fast is this new bad boy?

Check out this video showing 24 x SSD in Raid 0 to see some pretty awesome desktop performance. On the down side 24 drives would set you back around $9,600. For a more realistic use of these drives Joel Spolsky has a blog entry about his attempt to use them for speeding up compile times on developer machines.

Give it another couple of years and my next development machine is definitely going to have a couple of SSD drives in Raid 0 for holding the OS and applications. Reserve those large terabyte spindles for storing pictures and videos of the family cat.

Take as an example the Ribbon control, a recent innovation that started out in Office 2007. This is a recent control and so there is really no excuse for getting it wrong. So how many implementations of the ribbon would you expect there to be? Let us count them…

1, Office 2007 has the original.
2, Windows 7 has a different implementation.
3, Visual C++ now has a ribbon MFC classes.
4, WPF has a version written in managed code.

No wonder they need 100,000 developers at Microsoft when they duplicate so much work. Although they did cheat with the Visual C++ version as they bought it from a component vendor. Versions 1, 2 and 3 all have different code bases even though they all use C++ for the core implementation. I will cut them some slack on the WPF version as it needs to be written in a managed language and not C++.

Now add into the mix all the different ribbon controls from venders, including myself, for Window Forms, WPF, Silverlight and C++ and you’re talking about a massive level of coding duplication. Still, keeps us all in work I suppose.

Seems like every developer I come across uses it and thinks its wonderful. I have doubts but you don’t know till you try. At this point in time I have a mere 6 people following me so I’m not sure that my tweets are providing much value to the world!

Follow Phil

This version includes date, time and calendar controls so that you can create line of business applications with a professional look and feel. The number of free controls/components in the Toolkit is now an impressive 41.

New features in 3.5 include…

KryptonDateTimePicker
KryptonMonthCalendar
DateTimePicker for KryptonRibbon
MonthCalendar for KryptonContextMenu
Per-KryptonPage ButtonSpecs
Many bug fixes (consult change lists)

Download 3.5

WPF, the big brother of Silverlight, has been around since Vista was released and although a critical success has only slowly gained traction in desktop development. I think this is because WinForms, despite many shortcomings, is good enough for most business focused applications. With few ‘must have’ reasons to immediately make the jump, adoption is rising but only slowing.

Silverlight adoption has the potential to happen much faster for two reasons. First is the continuing trend towards richer internet applications. Although you can create nice websites using Ajax, jQuery and HTML it takes great developers pushing the limits to achieve it. Silverlight makes it possible for average developers to do the same but in less time.

The second force is just shear weight of numbers. With about a million .NET developers in the world you are instantly opening up rich internet development for them all. Asking a C#/WinForms developer to learn all about Ajax, jQuery, CSS and so forth is a steep learning curve with no leverage of existing skills. But ask the same developer to keep using C# and much of the same base class library and it becomes much more appealing. Plus once you have mastered Silverlight you can transition that knowledge over to your desktop apps with WPF.

This entire preamble merely explains why I find Silverlight interesting as an area I should start thinking about. I would like to hear bad about others opinions and get a discussion going about this topic.

1, Should Component Factory get involved in Silverlight?

2, What type of controls/components etc would be useful?

I have started a forum thread for this discussion. This will make it easier to track the full set of responses on an ongoing basis. Thanks.

Silverlight 3 Beta Site
Silverlight Development Links

Download IE8

This new beta has quite a few changes based on the feedback from testers of the first version earlier in the week. Most of the changes are in the date time picker and month calendar controls. Here is a full list of changes since the first beta…

KryptonDateTimePicker

• Text property now returns the actual displayed text, used to always return an empty string.
• MouseWheel now performs the key up/down action of the active text field.
• Entering 31 for the day number would not select the correct day.
• Up/Down actions on the day would not overflow within the same month.
• Mouse down on non-day parts of calendar would dismiss the context menu.

KryptonMonthCalendar

• Drawing was corrupted for many non-English culture settings.
• Can now set the background to transparent so parent background shows through.
• Changing the DayStyle could crash when using a KryptonPalette.
• When number of rows and columns were different mouse selection could crash.
• Can now enter 1 or 2 digits for the descriptive month field to change the value.

Other

• Palette upgrade tool now converts versions 12 and below to latest version 13.
• Switching Navigator between Outlook modes would cause a crash.
• KryptonComboBox would select text when you minimize/restore the form.

Download Beta 2

KryptonDateTimePicker
KryptonMonthCalendar
DateTimePicker for KryptonRibbon
MonthCalendar for KryptonContextMenu
Per-KryptonPage ButtonSpecs
Many bug fixes (consult change lists)

I will create a forum so that bugs and other feedback can be logged for the beta specific release.

Download Beta

Because the button spec collection is provided on a per-page basis you do not have to provide exactly the same button spec for every page, you can have different sets of buttons per-page. Here I have added a drop down button spec to the first page, a close button to the second and a couple of navigation buttons to the fourth.

As with all button specs you can specify tool tip information as shown in the above picture. You can also assign a KryptonContextMenu to the button spec so that clicking causes a popup menu thus…

Of course, the ability works not just for the default tab headers mode. Here you can see one of the CheckButton modes…

Even the Outlook Full mode will show buttons as specified.

Now that the KryptonMonthCalendar and KryptonDateTimePicker controls are finished I am working on a few minor enhancements like the one here before I make release a beta version. I expect it to be about a week from now when that gets released into the wild.

Also update is the ribbon so you can display and modify dates inside the ribbon groups as shown here.

There is only one remaining task, allowing the entry of numeric values using the keyboard numbers. Up and down keys are fine but entering the number directly is a feature of the built-in control that speeds up data entry.

Visual Studio 2010

Here we have the control displayed with each of the four Format property settings of Long, Short, Time and Custom. The associated CustomFormat is defined as “MMMM dd ‘at’ hh:mm tt“.

Clicking the drop down button presents the new KryptonMonthCalendar control inside a KryptonContextMenu instance that allows the selection of a new date. The DropDown event is fired before the calendar is displayed and allows you to customize the context menu with additional menu items as required. This could be very handy if you need to add extra options such as predefined date selection.

As with the standard control you can show a check box that allows the user to specify that the date should be null. In fact I have added an extra property called ValueNullable that will help with annoying data binding scenarios. The Value property works like the standard control and always returns a DateTime value but ValueNullable will return DBNull when the check box is cleared and return a DateTime when the check box is set. That should making binding against database columns easier.

Use ShowUpDown to show a pair of spin buttons instead of the default drop down button. As with most Krypton controls you can use ButtonSpec definitions to add extra buttons to the control area.

Text Editing

The one feature currently missing, and my next task, is the ability to modify the text area using the keyboard. I need to take the focus and highlight the different fragments of text such as just the month, day, hours and so forth. Then allow the up/down buttons and other keyboard actions to modify the value. This requires parsing the format and working out the correct drawing of different sections. Not that hard but it requires quite a bit work to get it working smoothly.

Even if all the hacks could be make to give the correct presentation if would still be unpleasant having to hope that they continue to work for all future versions of Windows. It is much more work to start from scratch but I hope it will pay off in the long run and allow a greater level of flexibility. Adding additional functionality will be easier when you have the full source code and can do anything you want.

The next step was to update the background color to match the palette setting. This is where things start to go downhill as I discover the DateTimePicker does not actually have a BackColor property. No problem I think to myself, I just need to override the WndProc and handle the WM_ERASEBKGND message myself. Draw the background in the required color myself and we are good to go.

Well not so fast. Although my code is executed it makes no difference to the displayed background. This is odd so I do some Google research and discover this is a well known bug in the control. Apparently the WM_ERASEBKGND approach works with controls that do not have visual styles enabled but fails otherwise. So I removed the application level call to EnableVisualStyles and tried again. Yep, now it draws the background correctly using my code. In practice almost all .NET applications call EnableVisualStyles when they are started so I need a solution that does not insist this line of code is removed from apps.

There is one last possibility which is to call SetWindowTheme(Handle, “”, “”) for the control instance and so turn off visual styles just for that one individual control. This allows the rest of the application to run as it likes but ensures we get the background drawn for our KryptonDateTimePicker instance.

Unfortunately this last gasp attempt just falls short. It draws the border and drop down button of the control in the Windows Classic appearance which is exactly what I expect when visual styles are turned off. But it still stubbornly does not draw the text background using the WM_ERASEBKGND code! Close but no cigar.

Unless someone out there has a clever idea it looks like I need to scrap the work and begin again with a new approach.

…the Sparkle Blue palette…

…and finally the System palette…

I know some would prefer the gradient effect colors for selection but I feel this is more appropriate.

These two properties mimic those available in the standard MonthCalendar control and perform the same funtions. Use ShowToday to have a button placed on the bottom header that is used to change the current selection to today. ShowTodayCircle will provide a highlight around today’s date so that you can find it quickly. This image show both of these properties defined.

There is an OverrideToday property so that you can alter the way in which the today’s date entry is highlighted. So if you prefer to change the background or text color then you can easily do so.

ButtonSpecs

As with many of the Krypton controls you can specify ButtonSpec instances in order to add extra functionality to the control. In the above pictures you can see an extra button with the text ‘XYZ’ added to the bottom header. All button specs are added to the bottom header. If you need to add many additional options you should set a button spec to have a drop down context menu.

You can use three properties to describe the dates you would like to appear in bold. These are the same as those for the standard MonthCalendar and allow arbitrary dates, per-month dates and per-year dates. If you prefer to show the dates in a different way you can alter the OverrideBolded state information to achieve the required appearance.

Week Numbers

Many accounting applications needs to show the week number alongside the dates to help the user correctly select the day of interest. Just like the standard MonthCalendar you can set the ShowWeekNumbers property as needed.

I’ve been able to restart work on the KryptonMonthCalendar and have it up and working as a standalone control although with limited functionality at the moment. Here is a picture of the current state…

You can use the mouse or keyboard to select a continuous date range and use the previous/next buttons to shift the displayed months forwards and backwards. Next I intend adding the ability to define dates that need to be shown in bold. This is something you can do with the standard month calendar as well so I guess many people will want the same ability in the Krypton version.

Now I need to add this as an element for use inside a KryptonContextMenu. This will allow it to appear in a drop down that will be required later when a date picker is created. It also means you’ll be able to create your own context menus that include a month calendar element. You could add menu options for pre-defined dates or other actions that are specific to your application.

With much more disruption than anticipated I am waaaaay behind the schedule I had set myself. I wanted to have the month calendar and date picker both finished at around this point. As it is I am only maybe a third of the way through creating just the month calendar.

If you have ever moved house then you will know how much time and aggravation it entails. Luckily the process is almost done and the removal company arrives tomorrow to truck our meager possessions to the new place. Internet access will not be supplied at the new house until the middle of next week and so I will be ex-communicated from today until then.

I have started work on the KryptonMonthCalendar control and although the disruption has put me a couple of weeks behind schedule I will be back to full coding speed very soon!

Creating the hierarchy of bread crumb items at design is very painful at the moment. You need to edit each set of child items as a flat list of items. So if you need to edit a node several levels down the structure you end up with several collection editors all open at the same time, one for each level of the structure as you make your way down to the node of interest. Not pretty.

I have now implemented a collection editor that presents all the items in a tree view so that you can see all the nodes at once and easily move them around as needed. Here you can see it in action…

KryptonWorkspace

The same problem applies to the recently introduced KryptonWorkspace control. It consists of a tree like hierarchy of elements that would benefit from a user friendly editor. In fact it needs the editor more than the bread crumb control because it is much harder to visualize the structure with the workspace. Here is the new improved editing dialog…

Remember this is the same company that turned down a $47.5bn offer from Microsoft last January. I wonder if Jerry Yang still thinks that offer ‘undervalued the company’. This is where the problem of having the original founder as CEO really causes problems. Is he really thinking about getting the best value for shareholders? I don’t think so and I doubt he would have sold the company to Microsoft for any price. Not only because he hates the mother ship but also because he would lose control of his baby. Yahoo is his creation, his project, his ego trip and so he naturally wants to keep it independent and keep control over it. Once Yahoo is sold off he is no longer ‘the founder’ and ‘the special one’ inside Yahoo. Instead he becomes just another employee and that assumes that he would actually be kept on after a takeover.

His inability to think like a real CEO has cost the shareholders 10’s of billions of dollars. I believe he will keep driving the company to nowhere until the other execs finally push him aside and appoint someone that can bear to sell the company. Although I suspect anyone interested in Yahoo should just wait another year till the bottom of the recession is reached and then pick it up for a fraction of even the current share price.

I bet Steve Ballmer is thanking his lucky stars he managed to dodge this bullet.

“I’ll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic, see if I can track an IP address.”

Check it out for yourself CSI:New York Clip

Download 3.0.8

The theory goes something like this. Everybody in the team knows who the worst programmer is. They usually stand out like a sore thumb and so everyone is carefully watching his work. But because his work is so closely monitored it is also corrected before it impacts the code base. Sure, you end up losing time but you can mitigate the problem because you are aware of it.

Now think about your own team and you will no problems deciding who the worst is. But who is the next worst? Who is the one that nobody is watching but is still checking in poor quality code? Their code spreads like a web throughout the project and so ultimately they limit the quality of the whole teams work. While you are carefully monitoring Mr. Dunce you are blissfully unaware of the time bombs being planted by his prodigy.

So take a look around your office and decide who is wearing the dunce’s hat and then decide who the runner up is. If you come to conclusion that there is no weakest player in your outfit then I have bad news. In poker they have a saying “If you don’t know who the patsy is…” and I hope I don’t need to finish the quote for you.

1 - ?? Operator
The ?? operator is called the null-coalescing operator and is used to define a default value for a nullable value types as well as reference types. It returns the left-hand operand if it is not null; otherwise it returns the right operand. So instead of using code like this…

if (reference == null)
   return _defaultInstance;
else
   return reference;

You can just write the following statement instead…

return reference ?? _defaultInstance;

Much cleaner and it even works for nullable value types.

2 - DebuggerStepThrough
This attribute can be added to a method or property accessor and used to speed up debugging. When debugging and using step-into the debugger will step past the method with this attribute. This is really useful in preventing you stepping in and out of the many one liners in the code. To apply do this…

public string Name 
{
   [DebuggerStepThrough]
   get { return _name; }
    
   [DebuggerStepThrough]
   set { _name = value; }
}

3 - Automatic Properties
Sick and tired of adding get/set code for simple properties? This is no longer a problem with the automatic properties added in C# 3.0. Instead of this…

private string _name;
public string Name
{
   get { return _name; }
   set { _name = value; }
}

…just do this…

public string Name { get; set; }

4 - Object Initializers

Also introduced in C# 3.0 are object initializers. This allows you to set property values inside the new statement. Without this you either create additional overloaded constructor with the possible set of initial values or you write the long hand like this…

Employee emp = new Employee();
emp.Name = "John Smith";
emp.Age = 10;

…but this is clearer…

Employee emp = new Employee {Name="John Smith", Age=10}

5 - Constant flags

Want to specify a float instead of a double for a constant? Most people know the ‘f’ modifier after a constant number informs the compiler to make it a single float value. But did you know the full list of others flags?

100m  (decimal)
100f  (float)
100d  (double)
100u  (uint)
100l  (long)
100ul (ulong)

Let me know if I have missed one you really like.

I know I shouldn’t find it quite so fascinating but for some reason I do. Like watching a beautiful tornado just before it smacks you in the face. Just because you know it’s going to hurt doesn’t stop it looking amazing on the way in.

I’m sure I won’t find it so fascinating as I stand inline at the soup kitchen. But watching the stock market and governments panic is not an everyday sight. If the financial world is sinking like the Titanic then I might as well stand of deck and enjoy the view.

Actually I blame the The Daily Show and the The Colbert Report, they could make the end of days sound funny.

To help make this process as easy as possible you can now buy a pack of 265 icons. As an introductory offer the price is just $79 during this month. Each icon has…

Three different sizes

Three different states

6 different file formats

- PNG, GIF
- ICO, PSD
- BMP (24bit & 32bit).

You can see a preview of all the icons here.

As many of you will already know I am going to be adding some Kryptonized date and calendar controls to the Toolkit for the next major release. I am doubtful that the Toolkit versions will have the same level of customization as the commercial version from VisualHint.

Update: Here is a link you should check out.

Download Link for 3.0.6

Major Bug Fixes
- Locking/Unlocking computer causes text to disappear.
- Text not drawing at all for some Visual Studio projects.
- ComboBox drop down not working on some computers.
- Cannot edit Image properties with KryptonContextMenu.
- Design time change of Ribbon.MinimizedMode crashes.
- Removing all Ribbon tabs still draws last tab shown.

Feature Changes
- KryptonDomainUpDown added to the Toolkit.
- KryptonBreadCrumb now has overflow button feature.

If you have a valid subscription to one of the commercial products the you should already have received an email notification with download details. You do not need new serial keys, existing 3.0 keys will work just fine. Also remember to uninstall your current version before installing the new one.

Fast forward to today and there would seem to be inflation in the number of product releases from Microsoft. From the release of Vista onwards we have the following client side technologies…

  WPF   WCF   WF   LINQ

Each of these covers a large area that would require many months to really understand well. In fact WPF alone is going to take you a year of full time use before you can say you’re truly proficient in it. If you want to include the server side then add the following into the mix…

  ASP.NET AJAX  
  ASP.NET MVC
  ASP.NET Dynamic Data
  ADO.NET Entity Framework
  Silverlight

I think I know why this rapid increase has happened and it’s all the fault of the .NET Framework. When I switched from developing applications with MFC/ATL to WinForms I noticed my productivity increased several fold. Maybe as much as a 5 fold increase in output once I was up to speed with using all the .NET goodness. Now you apply this same productivity increase to all the cubicles at the mothership and you have the above technology tsunami.

When I started as a Windows developer the only real distinction between us was the language that you used (C++ or VB). With the rise of the Internet the community split into server side and client side specialists. It was very hard to master both areas because of the sheer amount of knowledge needed although the better programmers could probably just about manage it.

Now I see the community is splitting again into even smaller groupings. Do you use WinForms or WPF? Do you use classic ASP.NET or the MVC Framework? Over time I expect to see this kind of fracturing into smaller and smaller groups to continue. Or at least that’s what I was expecting to happen. Maybe Microsoft has seen this trend and decided to try and reverse it. Is the use of XAML with WPF and Silverlight an attempt to unify your client and web developers back into one happy community again? Time will tell.

A worrying trend for Microsoft is that your average programmer is not even bothering to try and learn all the latest goodness. How many developers in your outfit actually use generics beyond List<T>? Generics have been around forever, at least compared to the above technologies, and still most developers are hardly using it. I heard a podcast where an interviewer for a .NET position found that only around 20% of the candidates actually used generics at all. Yikes.

Actually this is not really surprising as the majority of developers spend all day working on business applications that are going to generate revenue. When do you have the time to learn WPF/WCF/LINQ/etc when learning them is almost a full time job in itself? It is all very well for Scott Guthrie or Scott Hanselman to tell the world how great the new stuff is but real developers just don’t have the schedule to stop and learn for six months.

For me this is the biggest problem that Microsoft is facing. They have some great technologies but the challenge is how to get the bulk of developers, the average developer, to move forward and learn them. I expect the upcoming PDC2008 will release even more new tech but I wonder what they are going to do that makes it easier or more compelling for businesses to move forward and actually use them.

It seems that if you are building on .NET then they want to make it real easy to just push a button and have that application deployed into the ‘cloud’ so that it just works. Taking away the headache of finding a hosting provider, installing and configuring software such as SQL Server would certainly appeal to many. I suspect that the operating system is really just some extensions on top of Windows Server 2008. Just like Small Business Server is not really a different operating system but just Windows with some packaging for businesses placed on top.

Amazon are also extending some love to .NET developers by adding support for Windows Server and SQL Server within their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service. Currently in private beta testing this addition will help Windows developers that need to scale their web service without needing to handle all the scaling issues themselves. You pay only for the compute time used.

If we look into the future a little way we can image what Microsoft would like to achieve. They want .NET developers working on web applications to be able to sign up for a ‘cloud’ account and then just press a button within Visual Studio to have it deployed as a live system. With Microsoft, Amazon, Network Solutions and so on being providers of the actual hardware and providing a scalable system for you. Then you pay only for the amount of CPU/Disk used and need never worry about where the server is located. Add in Hyper-V and it becomes much easy for a provider to give every account their own isolated operating system that can then be moved around to different servers as needed.

Another new technology from Microsoft called Live Mesh is going to be presented at the PDC later this month and may well integrate into this story. It seems that the mothership has well and truely embraced ‘cloud computing’. But whatever you do don’t use that term with Larry Ellison from Oracle. When someone asked Larry what ‘cloud computing’ meant he said…

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”

Krypton Roadmap
The immediate future for the Krypton Toolkit is to add some date/time related controls. In particular a standalone calendar control and a standalone datetimepicker plus a calendar element that can be used inside the KryptonContextMenu. A docking system will also be added that is provided as a commerical add-on and become part of the Krypton Suite product. I expect all this to be wrapped up as version 3.5 and to be delivered at the end of the year or not long after.

Further out will be version 4.0 and include more Toolkit controls such as a progress bar, track bar and scroll bars. Included will be improvements to the docking and workspace components. The initial release of the workspace and docking windows have a minimal feature set and so this release will build on those and add extra features. For example the Workspace needs a persistence mechanism as well as a maximized mode so users can concentrate on a single cell for a period of time. The due date for this would be around 3 or 4 months after version 4.0.

Release 4.0+ is not currently determined so I am open to feedback for deciding on the direction to take. I will be asking for feedback nearer the time and decide then if I should create a data grid, gauge controls etc. Maybe at this point we will see a Beta version of the next Office and Windows revisions and so that might throw up some requests.

Longer term I expect to keep improving and adding to the Krypton set of components, including the free Toolkit, for as long as there is demand for WinForms components. I expect this to be quite a few years into the future as many companies have invested heavily in WinForm applications and have no big need to switch over to something else. As a small company I can live on the niche position of being an active WinForm developer when other vendors have had to switch away because they have large teams to pay.

WPF Roadmap
There are two factors driving my WPF strategy. First is the current slow adoption of WPF for new projects and the second is the potential redundancy of any new controls that are created. The slow uptake means there is no panic to quickly create something just because your sales have disappeared. In fact my sales have steadily improved right from the first release. This means I can take a more measured approach and watch how the market shapes up before deciding on how to structure any offering.

How long will the WPF market last should it become the de facto standard for client applications? I would estimate that 10-15 years is not unreasonable as GDI has lasted much longer than that. To get the most bang for your buck you want to create components/controls that will be valuable and useful for that entire 10-15 years. Now if you look at all the vendors that have rushed out WPF Ribbon controls you can see that the effort was of little long term value. Microsoft have stated that they are creating a WPF Ribbon that should be released by the end of this year. Now unless the Microsoft version is really bad I imagine most developers would use the Microsoft version rather than pay for one. Given WPF is now the main focus for client apps at the Microsoft it means they will doubtless add additional controls over time.

My current thinking is that I will wait until around the middle of next year before starting any serious coding of WPF components. At that point I will concentrate on components that  provide long lasting value and minimize the chances of them becoming obsolete because of Microsoft. That might sound a hard proposition but I have several ideas for initial components that I think would be very handy for developers and are unlikely to ever come from Microsoft themselves.

Summary
I will be continuing development of Krypton for as long as there is demand for the WinForms components, which I anticipate being several years. Around the middle of next year I will start spending some of my time working on WPF but note that I will still be working on Krypton as well.

Obviously any strategy is subject to change depending on market conditions but this is my current thinking. I would be interesting in hearing your feedback. If you have any better ideas or see fundamental problems with this then don’t be afraid to speak up!