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!

We’re excited to be announcing the immediate availability of the LightSpeed 5 Beta.

We have a big list of addition, changes and bug fixes so for now I’m just going to highlight some key differences in this post. In January we’ll be running a series on the major features when the final version is released.

Compiled Queries

Compiled queries allow you to speed up querying by having LightSpeed pre-parse the expression and get it ready for sending to the database. This provides a great speed up on repeated queries even if the parameter values change.

Then we got to thinking.

What if common queries (e.g. fetch by Id and others) were always pre-compiled behind the scenes?

What we found was huge: the performance benefits were great. This led us to turning on compiled queries for certain queries by default so you don’t need to use the compiled queries syntax. This resulted in a 60% performance boost. Free performance gain for all LightSpeed users — always a good thing. Especially good since LightSpeed is already blazingly fast!

Note: Posting any sort of performance comparison typically results in howls about how unfair they are or unrealistic but this highlights the speed of LightSpeed’s querying engine for a simple case. Suffice to say, LightSpeed does awesomely in complex scenarios also :-)

Database provider changes

We are working towards allowing end users to implement their own database providers and to allow support for mobile scenarios, to that end we have made some under the hood changes to the provider infrastructure in 5.0 as well as refreshing our supported providers.

Of note:

• A SQL 2012 provider that includes support for the Sequence identity type
• Improvements have been made in the designer to better reflect the list of available providers and to improve the design time experience for developers
• The database provider infrastructure has been overhauled as a precursor to allowing us to bring LightSpeed to mobile platforms in the future.

Visual Studio 2012 Support

We have had this in the nightly builds most of this year, but it’s worth mentioning again – LightSpeed 5 ships with full designer support for Visual Studio 2012, Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2008.

Additionally we have dropped the .NET 2.0 only compatibility build of LightSpeed so that LightSpeed can more directly make use of .NET 3.5 features in the core runtime.

Ever improved querying

We have continued iterating our querying support since 4.0 RTM with the core runtime now supporting HAVING expressions and more advanced sub-queries. For LINQ we have improved our handling of more complicated grouping queries and use of sub-queries to support staged query construction using IQueryable. The core runtime now also exposes a RawSql property on the query object to allow arbitrary SQL to be expressed where previously stored procedures or FindBySql would need to be used – this allows joining on an arbitrary SQL statement to handle situations where you need to explicitly control the SQL being emitted.

Small acorns

Whether it’s the ability to get an offending Validation rule when checking an entity is valid, or get more details about your entities using the LightSpeed.Meta framework, you’ll find something to delight you with LightSpeed 5. We look forward to hearing your feedback on the beta and we can’t wait to get LightSpeed 5 final out early in 2013!

The LightSpeed 5 Beta is now available to all active customers, and you can download this from your My Account page now!

Non-customers will have the 5 release in very early 2013 (or you can upgrade from LightSpeed 4 Free Edition and get the beta).

Huge Performance Boost

The main addition to version 3.0 is the immensely improved performance. The diagram rendering engine can now support thousands upon thousands of diagram elements. This is mostly noticable by the dramatically improved loading time. All other operations such as panning, editing and exporting have also been improved for large diagrams.

Connection Bridges

Another nice improvement to the framework is the ability to render bridges over intersecting connections. Managing the potentially large number of intersecting points has been made possible thanks to performance improvements mentioned above.

The connection intersections are always calculated, but by default the bridges are not rendered – all you need to do is switch them on. This is done by using a CorneredPathBuilder which is responsible for taking the logical connection model and generating the path geometry. To use this, you create a new connection style in the usual way and set the PathBuilder to be a CorneredPathBuilder with the IsIntersectionBridgingEnabled property set to true. Below is a simple example of how to do this:

<ms:CorneredPathBuilder x:Key="PathBuilder" IsIntersectionBridgingEnabled="True" CornerRadius="0" />
 
<Style x:Key="ConnectionPathStyle" TargetType="Path">
  <Setter Property="Stroke" Value="Black" />
  <Setter Property="StrokeThickness" Value="2" />
</Style>
 
<Style x:Key="ConnectionStyle" TargetType="ms:DiagramConnectionElement">
  <Setter Property="PathBuilder" Value="{StaticResource PathBuilder}" />
  <Setter Property="PathStyle" Value="{StaticResource ConnectionPathStyle}" />
</Style>
 
<ms:FixedStyleSelector x:Key="ConnectionStyleSelector" Style="{StaticResource ConnectionStyle}" />
 
<ms:DiagramFormatter x:Key="Formatter"
                     ConnectionStyleSelector="{StaticResource ConnectionStyleSelector}" />

Last of all you would set the Formatter of the DiagramSurface to be the DiagramFormatter in the code above.

Other Changes

Like most major releases, there are a few breaking changes in Diagrams 3.0. These changes are all very minor and you can see how to work around them in the Release Notes section of the help docs. One change that will most likely impact you is that we removed DiagramSurface.ShowConnectionPoints property. To work around this, you simply don’t need to set this property to True anymore so it can be removed.

Also, as always, there’s a bunch of bug fixes and general improvements.

Get it now!

You can download the free trial version of WPF Diagrams 3.0 from here. Or if you are already a Diagrams 2.0 customer with active subscription, then you can upgrade for free by going to your account page. If you have any questions about this new release you can drop by the forum.

Happy Coding :)

What is Raygun?

Raygun is a simple (read: take 2 minutes to setup) error collection, reporting and management service. At present it supports .NET and JavaScript but over the coming weeks will support many more languages and platforms (iOS, Android, Rails etc). When an unhandled (or handled if you want to report it) exception occurs, it gets published securely to Raygun.

You can login, view exceptions in your application, promote them into your own ticketing system, choose to ignore them, mark them as resolved and more. Of course we know a lot of folks manage more than one application so there’s a unified dashboard to track multiple applications at once and trend analysis of your applications health.

Here’s a very preliminary application shot (subject to a lot of change):

What makes Raygun valuable?

All software has bugs. The common experience we see is that either exceptions are ignored or a developer might have unhandled exceptions emailed to themselves. Even in the best of situations, this doesn’t scale:

• The developer gets used to seeing innocent errors and doesn’t notice when the occassional serious error goes by.
• The developer moves on to another company. Nobody sees the error messages anymore.
• There’s little or no visibility of issues in an application to anybody else on the team.
• It’s difficult to identify trends in application health from an inbox full of emails.

You should never under estimate the impact of the bugs in your applications:

• If you make money from your software then you could be losing money, never a good thing!
• A bad first impression can put new users off using your software.
• If the application is mission critical… the mission may go critical if an error is ignored! Nobody wants to be in the news for a software bug that went unnoticed!

We’d love to have you on board

Raygun is currently in early beta. We’ve setup a site to take interested parties on board slowly. We’d love to have you on board soon – the sooner you sign up the sooner we can send you a beta invite. We’re expecting to add initial test users soon with new users being invited daily after that (we’ve had a lot of interest so far, so sign up soon to get in earlier).

Sign up now and share the love. Let’s make the world’s applications more reliable.

John-Daniel Trask
Co-founder
Mindscape

P.S. We’ll be releasing new information regularly as we gear up for public launch. By signing up you’ll get emails about that progress and the cool features you’ll be able to take advantage of.

TransitionContentControl

WinRT has several built in animations for common application scenarios, but to help you even further, we have added the new TransitionContentControl. This control lets you specify an enter and exit transition which will be used to animate the content whenever it changes. Here are some examples of this in action:

Slide:

Spin:

Zoom:

As you can see below, this control is very simple to use. The content and transitions are binding to values in the data context. When the content changes, the animations kick into action. (At the moment is is easiest to bind the transitions or set them in code, convenient xaml support will come soon).

We provide several transitions to get you started which can be found in the PresetTransitions class. This includes fading, sliding, zooming and rotating transitions for various directions.

In some scenarios, you may find that you want different transitions depending on how the content is changing. For example if content is being navigated left or right, you’d want to dynamically pick different transitions to indicate this to the user. For these scenarios, you can implement the IStoryboardTransition interface. The GetStoryboard method takes in the old and new content which you can use to select an appropriate Storyboard. Here you could either select one of our prebuilt transitions and return their Storyboard, or you could build up your own storyboard for more complex scenarios like what we’ve done for zooming the new CalendarControl seen below.

CalendarControl

One of the controls we provided early on was the MonthCalendar. This has now been renamed to the CalendarControl as it now supports additional views. Other improvements we have added to this control are:

• Animations in the generic style to smoothly transition between views.
• Week numbers displayed in month view (templating and toggle options coming soon).
• The DataProvider property lets you set a custom ICalendarDataProvider to inject a data context for each day in month view and each month in year view etc.
• Style and template options that easily let you customize the look of each item in the calendar.
• A SelectedDate property for getting the date the user selected or setting the currently selected date.

Below is an example of what you can produce with these new improvements. A custom ICalendarDataProvider fetches a WeatherInfo object for each day in a month, and a list of temperature data for each month in the year view. Custom templates display this data in an appropriate way. This one control will suite all sorts of scenarios including a way to display data for days or months, a scheduler control or simply a way for the user to select a date.

We’re not done yet

As these controls are still in beta, you can expect more improvements up to and beyond the final release. If you have any feature or control requests, you can let us know by posting in the Think Tank. Or if you have any questions about the metro controls, ask us in the forum.

Until next time, get the latest beta build now!

Programs used:

• Image editor (for image creation)
• Visual Studio 2010 (use VS 2012 if you prefer!)
• Mindscape Web Workbench

Step 1: Setting up Compass

We will kick off by creating a new ASP.NET Website. We can then right click on the web site node in the Solution Explorer and select ‘Setup Compass Project’.

Step 2: File Structure

Once Compass is enabled you will see that two new folders have been created. One is called stylesheets which is where our scss is compiled, and the other is called [sass] where we will find our scss files.

For this example we will need to create three more things, an images folder with a sub-folder where we will place our sprites. It’s best to have all your sprites in one folder to make it easier to manage. For simplicities sake we also have a single HTML file that we’ll store — amazingly — our HTML in!

Step 3: HTML

We need to include our outputted css, so include the screen.css file in the head of your HTML file. As well as the css, we need a button to style! I just used a simple link tag.

Step 4: Generate Spriting Import

To sprite images together first you need images! I created 3 button states:

• normal
• hover
• active

I’ve included the images in the btn sub-folder we made under images.

Once you have done this, right click on the btn folder and select ‘Generate Spriting Import’.

Step 5: Including the Generated Scss

After generating the spriting import you’ll find that there is a new sprites folder in our sass folder. Inside will be our generated scss. We then include that file in our screen.scss file so the mixin’s defined in that file get included when we save our screen file.

Step 6: Using Generated Mixins

Create your awesome button with scss, for the background images use the generated mixins created by compass, along with the image name.

Step 7: Changing Compass Defaults

We still need to change some defaults to make our button sprites work. Inside your config.rb file we have to uncomment “relative_assets”.  We want our sprites to repeat horizontally we will need to change the default “no_repeat” to “repeat-x” on line 59 of our generated _btn.scss file. This is primarily for this tutorial, but it’s the easiest way to demonstrate this technique.

Finished Result!

And that’s it! Our 3 small images are now sprited:

Feel free to Download the Source Files and have a look for yourself. :)

Don’t forget to grab the Web Workbench for Visual Studio here.

Why is this awesome for web developers?

• Compass can automatically handle image spriting for you.
• Compass includes many more Sass functions than provided by the default Sass compiler.
• Zero setup needed by you, the developer – one click install of the Mindscape Web Workbench!

One click, get it all!

The Mindscape Web Workbench is available from the Visual Studio Gallery. It includes support for Sass, Less, CoffeeScript, Iced CoffeeScript – both compilation and syntax highlighting. The single VSIX works with both Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012.

Compass support is included for free in the Web Workbench and is available immediately. Don’t forget to rate us on the Gallery also!

What do you want to see next? Tell us here or vote!

CoverFlow displaying pages of information:

Curvaceous path:

Rotated items:

As well as minor bug fixes and improvements to other controls, another useful update is the MonthCalendar.DayOfMonthTemplateSelector property. This lets you customize the look of days displayed in the MonthCalendar control. One way of utilizing this feature is to display data on each day like in the example here:

Stay tuned for next weeks update as we roll out more features and controls!

Thanks again to everyone who has been providing us with feedback and requesting features. If you have any questions about our Metro Elements controls, head on over to the forum. Or if you have any requests, let us know in the think tank.

Until next time, get the latest beta update now!

Creating an Area Chart

Just like when I showed you how to create a bar chart last time, creating an area chart is as simple as adding 1 or more AreaSeries tags between the Chart tag. Below is a simple code example of doing this. Each series is binding to a collection of randomly generated Point objects. The SeriesBrush property is used to give each series a distinct color.

<ms:Chart Title="Area Chart">
  <ms:AreaSeries ItemsSource="{Binding DataA}" SeriesBrush="#9DB82B" />
  <ms:AreaSeries ItemsSource="{Binding DataB}" SeriesBrush="#F0A82A" />
  <ms:AreaSeries ItemsSource="{Binding DataC}" SeriesBrush="#851215" />
</ms:Chart>

Area Style

Now lets start looking at how to style the various parts of an area chart. First off, the colored area style. Styling the colored area allows you to customize the opacity of the area, make the area a different color to the line, or use a subtle gradient or other brush if you so wished. Here is a simple area style that uses a lighter opacity than the default:

<Style x:Key="AreaStyle" TargetType="Path">
  <Setter Property="Opacity" Value="0.4" />
</Style>

You can apply your custom area style by setting the AreaStyle property on the AreaSeries. Other chart series that also have this property are SplineAreaSeries, StackedAreaSeries and StackedSplineAreaSeries.

Line Style

Next lets look at customizing the line that connects all the data points. This is useful for changing properties such as the thickness and color of the line. Here is a line style that creates a thick line with slightly rounded points:

<Style x:Key="LineStyle" TargetType="Path">
  <Setter Property="StrokeThickness" Value="7" />
  <Setter Property="StrokeLineJoin" Value="Round" />
</Style>

To apply a custom line style, simply set the LineStyle property of the series you want to style. As well as all the different area charts, this property is also available on LineSeries, SplineSeries, StackedLineSeries and StackedSplineSeries.

Symbol Style

Last of all is the symbol style. Symbols can be rendered at each data point on the chart. By default, all charts apart from ScatterSeries don’t display a symbol. The SymbolStyle property on line, area and scatter charts lets you enable and customize what symbols to display. Here is a symbol style for rendering a cross at each data point:

<Style x:Key="CrossSymbolStyle" TargetType="ms:DataPoint">
  <Setter Property="Width" Value="18" />
  <Setter Property="Height" Value="18" />
  <Setter Property="Margin" Value="-8,-8,8,8" />
  <Setter Property="Template">
    <Setter.Value>
      <ControlTemplate TargetType="ms:DataPoint">
        <Path Width="{TemplateBinding Width}" Height="{TemplateBinding Height}" Fill="{TemplateBinding Background}"
               Data="M 0 2 L 2 0 L 4 2 L 6 0 L 8 2 L 6 4 L 8 6 L 6 8 L 4 6 L 2 8 L 0 6 L 2 4 Z" Stretch="Fill" />
      </ControlTemplate>
    </Setter.Value>
  </Setter>
</Style>

And that’s all you need to know for customizing the data display of area series, line series and scatter series. Keen to create fantastic Windows 8 charts? Grab the trail from our Metro Elements page. If you have any questions about any of this, let us know in the forum.

Book Control
With smooth animations and touch support, the book control is an interesting way to display pages of information that feels natural to flip through. Click the image below to see it in action.

CoverFlow Control
This is another fantastic control to put in your Windows 8 store applications that lets the user slide through a collection of items. This control is highly customizable and can virtually handle an infinite number of items.

PromptDecorator Control
The PromptDecorator can be wrapped around various controls such as a TextBox and ComboBox to give your users a handy indication of what they’re expected to input.

MonthCalendar Control
The MonthCalendar control displays the days of a particular month in a classic easy to view calendar layout. This control can be used for the user to select a date, or to display information on particular days.

UniformGrid layout panel
And last of all, since WinRT doesn’t have one, we’ve provided a UniformGrid layout panel that functions in the same way as the WPF version.

As usual, toolbox icons, samples, documentation and design time support are on their way. While your waiting for these, you can start playing around with the new controls and let us know what you think.

Thank you all who have been giving us feedback and requesting new controls in the forum. If you have any questions about how to use any of the controls available so far, let us know in the forum and we’ll help you out. Also, if you have any control or feature requests, we’d love to hear then in the Think Tank.

Get the latest update of the beta now!