April 2012 Mega Pack Sale

What’s good about April? Four day weekend; chocolate in rabbit format (!?); and a massive sale at Mindscape!

To spice this month up a bit we’re doing 50% off the Mega Pack, normally priced at $999 USD, but until the end of April you can get it for just $499 USD.

Five reason’s why the Mega Pack is awesome:

• You get all 9 amazing Mindscape developer tools worth thousands, at a great price
• Included are 12 months of updates, new releases and nightly builds
• Mindscape products are designed to save you time and improve your productivity
• New products released for the duration of your subscription are added free of charge
• It’ll help you be the best developer you can be

So head on over to the sale page, grab your discount code and make it a productive April!

Make building better software your New Year’s resolution by taking advantage of our 30% sale on the Mega Pack.

For a limited time, pay only $699 and you’ll receive:

• LightSpeed O/R Mapper (normally $349)
• WPF Elements (normally $699)
• WPF Diagrams (normally $699)
• Silverlight Elements (normally $699)
• Phone Elements for WP7 (normally $299)
• NHibernate Designer (normally $99)
• SimpleDB Management Tools (normally $29)
• Web Workbench (normally $29)
• Visual Tools for SharePoint (normally $349)

Plus, you also get:

• 12 months of new releases, nightly builds and new products!
• The best support in the business!

Imagine that – a full range of developer tools across WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, Data Access, Web Development and Domain Modeling for just $699!

So, save thousands of dollars by getting all your tools at once with our 30% off Mega Pack Special now.

Hurry, promotion ends 1 Feb 2012!

User interaction

First lets have a look at what this dashboard provides in the user interface. Along the top of the dashboard is the time explorer control. This allows the user to select a time range by dragging or clicking the mouse. By zooming in with the mouse wheel, the time explorer will display shorter time intervals such as weeks and days. Within the time explorer is a line chart displaying some summary data for the overall dashboard. This makes it easy for the user to select a time range around any interesting points in the data. Every time the user selects a new time range, the data displayed in the charts, gauges and data grid are updated to only include the data in the selected time range.

Data drill down

The stacked bar chart below the time explorer is plotting a category breakdown of the data for each point displayed on the X axis. An individual bar shows the data for either a month, day, or 2 hour time slot based on the magnitude of the selected time range. Clicking on one of the bars will drill down to the next time interval.

Category filtering

Selecting one of the segments in the doughnut chart will filter the data grid by the selected category, and emphasise the appropriate points in the stacked bar chart and the equivalent gauge.

Along the bottom of the dashboard is a text block displaying the total sales value, animated linear gauges, and our WPF data grid. Users can reorder, resize and sort the columns in the data grid to display the current data however they would prefer.

MVVM architecture

The MVVM design pattern is commonly used to create robust WPF applications that are easy to maintain. The main idea behind this pattern is to cleanly separate the data model from the user interface. The only things linking these two parts together should be bindings, commands and event handlers. The data model of the dashboard application listens to changes made to the various controls based on the user interaction. These changes are analysed and the displayed data held within the model is updated to reflect the selected time ranges or filters. The controls within the user interface listen to the changes made to the data model and then updates the visuals for the user to see.

You can download the trial version of the latest nightly build from here, or go to your account page if you are already a customer. The smaller data model classes can be found in the Model folder. The main data model class is called DashboardViewModel, and the UI is built up in the DashboardView.xaml file. The SimpleLinearGauge extends our AnimatedValueDisplay, and the remaining class files are for hooking into the Caliburn Micro framework.

Have any questions about WPF Elements? We’d love to hear from you in the forum!

We’ve been blown away by the interest in the Mindscape Web Workbench. It seems .NET web developers were hungry for Sass, Less and CoffeeScript inside Visual Studio as we’ve now passed 14,000 installs! We’ve had a boat load of feedback and we’ve been incorporating the smaller bug fixes into our nightly builds while in the background working on a grunty new version for you all!

Going Pro

We originally released this tool to scratch an itch. We wanted to play with some of the cool new tech that was being used in the open source camps and so the idea of the Web Workbench was born. With the massive uptake in interest of the product though we’re thinking it would be fantastic to spend even more time investing in making it the best Visual Studio Extension possible. To be able to achieve that we need to fund the development while still keeping this as inexpensive as possible and also keeping what is currently there free.

Here’s what we have done:

• There will always be a free version and everything in version 1 continues to be free.
• None of the existing features will require you to have a Pro version and in fact they will just continue to run better than v1!
• Some new features will be for Pro users only by way of thanks for supporting the new developments.
• The price of the Pro edition should be low enough that it’s a no brainer to support future development.

That last point is the key one I want to make. We’ve been swamped with great ideas, feature requests and things we could improve. By purchasing a Pro license you’re helping support the future development of the tool and as a sign of appreciation we want those that help to get some nice extra bits and pieces.

So what is new in Version 2?

V8 Engine Enabled – Free Feature
Feedback on the initial version was great… until folks had BIG files. Like 1000+ line CoffeeScript files. Unfortunately the JavaScript engine we used, while very cool, wasn’t quite fast enough to keep up with such large files. We have spent the last few weeks baking in Google’s V8 JavaScript engine that ships with Google Chrome to super charge the speed when working with larger files. Early feedback on a test release was very promising:

“I am using win7 x64 – I just applied the update and I am seeing a great improvement! Woohoo!” – Dan

“10 words: “Awesome job”!” – Bagosm (aka Binary Man)

This improvement is included for everyone, including the free users.

LESS compilation – Pro Feature
Initially we did not compile LESS files into .css files as we assumed folks used the JavaScript parser. Feedback was that it would be really cool if the Web Workbench would just create the CSS files on save in the same way that we do with Sass. So this is now included.

CSS & JavaScript Minification – Pro Feature
Editing the files is great, but having another step to do minification was proving to be a hassle to users. In the pro edition we now include the option to minify both the CSS output and the JavaScript output, saving you even more time!

Thanks again for all your feedback to date and we hope this release makes the Web Workbench even more compelling for you. Thanks to everyone who helps support the ongoing development effort by upgrading to the Pro edition — we have some really great ideas for the future and you’re helping it become a reality.

You can obtain version 2.0 by doing an update from the Extension Manager in VS 2010, or by clicking here to download it free. If you wish to support further development the purchase options are available within the Web Workbench itself. And if you don’t, well, all the features you love are still there and we hope you enjoy the free V2 enhancements as well!

 

 

Note: This sale has now ended.

For our friends in the northern hemisphere it’s that time of the year – it’s warming up and there’s a holiday approaching. We thought it would be a great time to offer a special for the summer so that you have a great toolbox at your disposal for when you’re coding away on the beach.

Here’s the deal:

For the price of our WPF or Silverlight suites you can get a full Mindscape Mega Pack upgrade at no extra charge! And to save you money in the long run we’ll also add an additional six months of updates! Now that will afford you a few extra Mojitos!

So that’s every Mindscape product — WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, LightSpeed, SimpleDB, you name it — and 18 whole months of nightly builds, upgrades and entirely new products! All at a fraction of the price of other competing suites.

Throw on your skate shoes and roll over to the Summer Sale Page!

Tooting our own horn a little, we have had very positive feedback from many customers who have said our support is fantastic. We hope this addition helps us maintain end user happiness as we continue to grow and our support load scales up.

What is priority support?

Priority support is the option to ensure that your request is dealt with promptly, and is reviewed before and prioritised over normal forum posts. It is also useful for folks who wish to not use the forum which is quite open and may not be viable for talking about sensitive parts of a software system.

Can I use it for feature requests?

No, we still urge that feature requests be posted in the forums so that others may discuss them (and because we don’t think it’s fair to charge you for suggesting cool features!). Features are still only added to products at our discretion.

How much does priority support cost?

We have priced support at $199 USD per priority support issue OR at $499 for a 5 pack of support issues, a 50% saving. You will be able to see if you have support tickets in your store account page. We have been issuing 1 priority support ticket per customer to LightSpeed 3.0 customers and upgrading Enterprise Edition customers. For other products, we’re in the process of migrating Enterprise customers to have a priority ticket added to their account.

The pricing is designed to be very cost effective and is inexpensive compared to the support options offered for other software (for example, one commercial NHibernate support vendor quotes 600 Euro, approximately $870 USD, per incident for ad hoc support).

You can purchase Priority support tickets in our online store.

Do I need it? Should I put all my requests through priority support?

If you need a guaranteed response, or a quick response is crucial to you, or you don’t want to discuss your issue on the public forum, then you should put a request through priority support. The forum will still get monitored actively by Mindscape staff and questions will be answered, but there are no guarantees around response times (our response times have usually been pretty good, but never guaranteed!).

Priority support is for those times when you need additional help and you don’t want to rely on the forums. You are welcome to simply buy a support ticket as you need them for $199 USD however it may be wiser to simply purchase a 5 pack in order to save 50%.

If I’ve missed any questions you have then please post a comment – I’m happy to answer them :-)

If you have .Net 3.5 installed and your browser supports XBAPs then you can try out all the themes right here.

The pack includes themes based on the Microsoft Office and Expression applications so your users will find them familiar and easy to use.

WPF Themes comes with documentation to help you get started quickly, and a few samples demonstrating how to apply a theme to your applications. The samples can also be used to view how the themes look on all the various controls that they support.

Plus, if you’re looking to make your own themes for your WPF applications, WPF Themes is a great way to help you get started. The themes are provided as source code, so you can simply copy whichever theme you like, and modify it to suit your needs. All the XAML files are well structured containing easily noticed comments making it easy to find the style for the control you want to see. Across all five themes, the order of the styles are kept the same which makes it easy to compare them.

WPF Themes is available to try out and buy today. Mega Pack customers will find WPF Themes available for download in the next few days.

Using WPF PropertyGrid or WPF Elements? The WPF Property Grid already includes two of these themes, and we’ll be shipping the remaining WPF Property Grid themes plus all five themes for Elements over the next few days.

If you have any queries about WPF Themes, or want help or advice with making your own themes then we would love to hear from you. Simply put a comment up on our WPF Themes support forum.
Happy styling =)

To celebrate, we’re offering a fantastic discount for everyone!

The Mindscape MegaPack contains the following per developer:

• LightSpeed Professional
• WPF Property Grid
• WPF Elements – 13 essential WPF controls
• WPF Flow Diagrams
• WPF Star Diagrams
• SimpleDB Management Tools
• All new products released by Mindscape for the duration of your subscription
• Source code (Premium edition only)
• Priority support (Premium edition only)

We offer two editions: Professional and Premium. The difference between the two is that the Premium Edition includes source code for the products as well as Priority Support.

Purchase today!

To celebrate the launch of these suites we’re offering a sale of up to 30% off the retail price of the Mega Pack editions. This stacks up to tremendous savings for you: not only will you be saving with our launch special but further saving by virtue of the packs already being a discount on purchasing individually.

The sale strictly ends at the end of Friday the 4th of September.

Mega Pack Premium: Normally $749, sale price $499 per developer
Mega Pack Professional: Normally $599, sale price $399 per developer

Don’t delay – lock in the savings and improve your development productivity today.

Questions and Answers

How much will subscription renewal cost?

Typically the renewal rates on the subscription will be approximately 40% of the retail price. This will provide an additional 12 months of benefits. If you elect not to renew you may continue to develop with the versions that were available as part of your subscription however you will not have new releases made available to you.

I’ve seen this in the store – is it really new?

We setup the Mega Pack products in the store some time ago due to the demand for all inclusive suites however we have not publicly announced or advertised the availability until now.

If you have any questions please leave a comment or contact me directly: jd@mindscape.co.nz

Take advantage of the special launch sale prices here.