Home » Blog

Archive for the ‘News’ category

LightSpeed 4 Beta now available!

That’s right! Kicking off 2011 in style, we’re excited to announce that we have started shipping nightly builds of LightSpeed 4 Beta! LightSpeed 4 Beta is available to current LightSpeed 3 customers now.

What’s new with LightSpeed 4?

The primary focus of LightSpeed 4 has been on distributed enhancements – helping get your data get where it needs to be with LightSpeed taking care of all the hard work. We posted about some of the highlight features for distributed solutions in an earlier blog post, but the highlights: Distributed Entities, DistributedUnitOfWork, RIA Services, DTO mapping improvements and much more!

There’s plenty of other great things coming with LightSpeed 4 and we will be sure to be posting about them in the coming weeks.

We’d love to hear from you!

To help make this the best release of LightSpeed ever we would love to hear your feedback on LightSpeed 4 Beta. Fire us an email, post in the forum, poke us on twitter – whatever way you want, we want to hear your feedback. Bug reports, feature suggestions – anything.

Download it now!

Current LightSpeed customers can download immediately from their account page. Look for “LightSpeed 4 Beta Program”. The nightly builds will be available under the files for this product. If you’re not yet a customer, go and check out the free version of LightSpeed 3.11 and see what you’re missing out on! :-)

Notes for the beta

If you’re using the beta, please remember:

• Uninstall any existing installations of LightSpeed before installing the Beta.
• LightSpeed 4 does not install side by side with LightSpeed 3.
• There have been changes to DTO generation so if you’re testing a solution that uses DTO’s please get in touch if you have any issues.

Have fun!

Silverlight Elements 2.0 is here!

The worst kept secret in Mindscape history is out — we’re proud to announce the release of Silverlight Elements 2.0, a major new version of our suite of controls for Microsoft’s Silverlight application and media platform!

Silverlight Elements 2.0 is packed with components that support common business functionality, make for more convenient user interaction or just make your application look cool.

SPECIAL: Read about our limited time special offer!

Silverlight Elements – for the line of business

The big new feature in Silverlight Elements 2.0 is charting. Create great-looking charts in minutes, and pimp them out from the extensive gallery of sample styles.

Silverlight Elements includes bar, line, spline, area, spline area, pie, doughnut, scatter and bubble charts, plus stacked variants of the bar, line, area, spline and spline area charts. These choices make it easy for you to create visualisations that help business users rapidly absorb, assess and compare information.

Click to see full size

Silverlight Elements charting is fully idiomatic Silverlight, supporting data binding, styling and templating. You can use styles and templates to customise the appearance of chart elements such as bars, symbols, lines, axes, data labels and legends. You can even use data-dependent styling, for example to highlight values that fall above or below the expected range. Full data binding support means you can use Silverlight charts against existing business objects. What’s more, if you bind a chart to an observable data source, it will update in real time — a painless way to ensure your users are always working with the most current data!

There’s not room here to talk about all the other cool features, like multiple Y axes, axis scaling, stripey backgrounds and support for massive data sets, but we’ll be posting lots of examples over the coming days. Watch this space!

While charting is the big new feature, Silverlight Elements also includes a bunch of other controls that are useful in business scenarios, such as the popular Scheduler control, list and tree-list views, and many more.

Silverlight Elements – for your users

Although Silverlight is a great platform for building rich user experiences, the set of controls it comes with is fairly basic. Silverlight Elements includes a bunch of components that you can use to improve the navigability and usability of your application. Users are familiar with idioms like menus, expanders and split buttons, and with Silverlight Elements they can have them!

Click to see full size

In addition, Silverlight Elements provides a number of familiar controls from the Windows and Office environments, such as color pickers, time pickers, a numeric up-down spinner, an Outlook-style navigation bar and many more, to help your users get up and running with your application as quickly as possible!

Silverlight Elements – for looking good

If there’s one thing better than an application which does the job and makes it easy, it’s an application which does the job, makes it easy and looks great doing it. With Silverlight Elements, you can use controls such as CoverFlow and Book to create engaging, tactile user interfaces which users love to interact with.

Better still, Silverlight Elements ships with five themes, allowing you to easily achieve an attractive, modern Office- or Expression-style look in your application.

Silverlight Elements – for free goodies!

As part of Silverlight Elements 2.0, we’re making three controls — CoverFlow, Book and Expander — available for FREE! Just download the free edition of Silverlight Elements and you can use these controls to your heart’s content without paying one red cent.

The free edition also includes evaluation versions of all the other controls so you can try them out and see how they can help you to build great applications.

We’re also offering a special bonus to customers who purchase the full version in the next two weeks: a $100 discount and a free copy of Laurent’s Bugnion’s book Silverlight 4 Unleashed (the proper dead tree edition you can keep on your desk, not a PDF!).

Silverlight Elements – get it now!

Silverlight Elements 2.0 is available now — grab the free edition and take it for a spin, or head for the store to take advantage of the limited time discount and free book offer. Happy coding!

Thoughts on Silverlight

As many of you will be aware, Microsoft’s PDC event this year occurred last week and with it came a comment from Bob Muglia that “our strategy has shifted” in relation to Silverlight. The impending release of IE9, Microsoft argues, makes HTML5 a viable option for “reach” applications based on the desktop Web browser, with Silverlight’s additional features making it the choice for more specialised scenarios such as Windows Phone 7, media-centric applications and line of business apps.

This comment has caused considerable concern in the Silverlight community. (Especially those who went into fainting fits at “Windows Phone 7″ and didn’t see that Bob Muglia went on to talk about all the other areas that Microsoft are still backing Silverlight for.) As usual with a new technology, Microsoft went into marketing overdrive with Silverlight and sold it as the solution to everything from Web development to stubborn stains. Which of course it never was. Silverlight was, and is, a great platform for certain kinds of application. If you’re building rich media apps, intranet applications or certain kinds of Internet application, then Silverlight is still in the sweet spot. But Microsoft are saying that for building Internet-facing, cross-platform Web sites with maximum reach, they’re shifting their backing to HTML5.

So what does this mean for Mindscape customers? It means the same great support and investment in Silverlight, and a continuing focus on the Silverlight sweet spots. As you’ll know, we’ve got a great suite of controls for Silverlight – we’re on the Silverlight bandwagon and have many customers delivering fantastic solutions with the help of our products. We are committed to improving our Silverlight Elements product and have a release planned shortly for a major new version that includes some of the best chart controls ever built for Silverlight. We will continue to support Silverlight Elements and to actively invest in it; in other words – it’s business as usual for us! :-)

Further to this investment, we are not ignoring Windows Phone 7. We have Windows Phone 7 hardware and our developers have been working on testing the capabilities of Silverlight on WP7. We will be releasing an update for our Silverlight controls that fully supports the Windows Phone 7 environment. This will go beyond just making sure the controls run, but making sure we ship with native themes to create an excellent experience for end users and developers alike.

In short, just as we’ve always done, we’re investing in Silverlight for the development of some rich web applications, Intranet applications and Windows Phone 7 development — exactly the areas where Microsoft recommends it.

What about HTML 5?

We’re not technology zealots. We know that every technology has its place: Silverlight, HTML 5, Flash, even ActiveX. (Well, okay, not ActiveX. But every other technology.) And we’ll always be working hard to deliver what our customers need to create the best solutions possible — using whatever technology is right for the job.

We think HTML 5 is pretty awesome — a huge step forward from what was possible in the previous generation of browsers. But the reality is that there’s going to be a big lag in adoption. (Let’s face it, it’s hard getting some people to move on from creaky old IE6.) Even ignoring consumer adoption, HTML 5 developer tooling doesn’t come close to what developers are used to on the Silverlight or .NET platforms.

Right now, we’re watching HTML 5, taking notes, kicking around ideas, planning and seeing what value we can add which would aid in the delivery of kick-ass solutions. We don’t have any news for you yet, but keep watching for announcements — HTML 5 is going to be big and we’re going to be there!

Back to the future: Even quicker turnaround

One of the benefits of using Mindscape products is that we make available nightly builds, so you can get fixes and enhancements turned around as quickly as a very quick thing.

To help our customers even more, we have moved the nightly build process to execute in the New Zealand evening, rather than approximately 3am New Zealand time. This means that the “next nightly build” should typically be available around midday for European countries and by start of business of US customers.

The cool thing about this which may not be immediately obvious is that New Zealand is geographically based at the international dateline meaning our day starts before customers in other countries. So, for example, when you wake up bright and early and stroll into work on morning of the 15th of October, the nightly build from the evening of the 15th of October, containing all the spiffy toys we added that day, is already waiting for you – freshly baked, from the future.

The pratical impact is you now get the nightly builds about 4 hours earlier. Another way of making development easier with Mindscape tools, we hope you like it :-)

Free software for user groups

Mindscape has always been very community oriented – many of the team speak at local user groups, Code Camps, Tech Ed, Unplugged events and so on. We’ve also been active in sponsoring community events like the Super Happy Dev House, NH-Day, Girl Geek Dinners and more. It’s time to do more however and we’ve been really pleased with the joint success we have had in helping user groups. Part of doing more is helping spread the word that we do want to help :-)

Our primary sponsorship method is to provide free software as prizes for user groups. We typically target Microsoft related user groups as our products are all in that space. So if you run a .NET/Silverlight/WPF/SQL Server/Microsoft Bob/C# user group, get in touch!

In retrospect, perhaps the Microsoft Bob user group was not quite ready for Ivan’s ‘Whirlwind Tour of LINQ Expression Trees.’

How does the process work for user groups?

Step 1: Get in touch
Email usergroups@mindscape.co.nz to tell us about your user group. We’re always keen to actually know the user group leaders and help them out in any way we can, so ping us an email and we can discuss what works for you.

Step 2: Eh? What?
There is no step 2. These are not the droids you’re looking for. Once we’re talking, we’re pretty quick to nail down our sponsorship based on your user group’s needs and organise how to provide the software.

What software do you provide?
We typically provide one free license to one of our products (excluding the Mega Packs) for each meeting. This works well because the folks running the event can choose a product that suits the audience. For example, if the topic is Silverlight related then our Silverlight Elements suite would likely go down well.

We also provide free software for speakers. Speaking for the first time in particular is really hard, we understand that, and we know user groups need a continuing stream of speakers in order to thrive. So to encourage people to take the leap, we offer a Mindscape Mega Pack — that’s every single developer tool we produce — to the speaker at each event.

Can you do me a favour?
Have you been to a local user group or do you know somebody involved in one? Please forward them a link to this post as we’d love to be connected with more user groups around the world. We currently sponsor about 15 user groups globally — and we want more right away :-)

Happy coding!