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Nightly news, 11 June 2010

Lots of stuff going on at Mindscape HQ right now, but we’ve found time to deliver a few enhancements and bug fixes in the last week’s worth of nightly builds. Here’s the goodness.

WPF Elements

We’ve started porting some of the cool controls from Silverlight Elements to WPF, and the following are done and included in the current nightly build of WPF Elements:

• DualProgressBar
• TimePicker
• TimeSpanPicker

Other controls will be arriving in future nightlies — we expect to make a proper announcement next week.

LightSpeed

• We’ve added some checking to the designer to provide a more meaningful warning if you create an association to a concrete table inheritance base class.
• Fixed a problem with validation when using .NET remoting.
• Fixed a designer bug which prevented you from using the tree view to add CLR attributes.
• We’ve fixed a problem in optimistic concurrency checking where version information was being updated on a failed save. This fixes a related issue which could result in concurrency checking being fooled by repeated save attempts.
• Updated SQLite provider to version 1.0.66.

Silverlight Elements

• The RichTextEditor now supports changing the background colour.

WPF Property Grid

• Fixed an issue with dangling event handlers which could cause memory leaks or errors in collection scenarios.

Nightly news, 5 May 2010

We’ve frequently been asked to publish change logs for our nightly builds, and although it’s not very convenient for us to make that information available on a nightly basis, we thought it would be a good idea to publish the occasional round-up of recent changes. We are planning to make this a weekly thing… for some value of “weekly” that will depend on how much JD gets distracted into making Photoshops of Batman.

Here, then, is a round-up of the last week or so’s fixes and enhancements across the Mindscape product range.

LightSpeed

• Visual Studio 2010 designer support! We’ll be officially launching this soon, but it’s already in the nightlies.
• Support for using SQL Server spatial data type methods in a query. Instructions here.
• Consistent read support for Amazon SimpleDB. Instructions here and here.
• Support for localising field names in validation messages. Instructions here.
• You can now add (but not remove) unique constraints via the designer and via migrations.
• The designer now remembers the zoom level when you save the model. Handy for big models where you usually want to work zoomed out.
• Fixes for a spurious error in the designer, for Oracle SYS_GUID support in the designer and for entity range variables in LINQ joins.
• Fixed a British spelling in the help file. Hey, you may think this isn’t worth mentioning, but JD brooded about it for six straight days…

Silverlight Elements

• New OutlookBar control.
• New Expander control.
• New menuing and command controls: Menu, ContextMenu and SplitButton.
• New numeric controls: Slider, DualSlider, DualProgressBar and NumericUpDown.
• New layout controls: DockPanel and a pair of truncating StackPanels.
• TimePicker and TimeSpanPicker now have up-down functionality.
• Several fixes to design-time functionality and to the UniformGrid.

WPF Property Grid

• Fix for TypeEditors mapped to built-in editors not respecting BuiltInEditorStyles.

SimpleDB Management Tools

• Visual Studio 2010 support.
• Now uses consistent reads for all queries.
• Old-style query syntax (Amazon’s Crazy-Ass Query Language (TM)) is no longer supported.

You can download the latest nightly builds from the store, or from the Downloads page for free and trial editions.

Improved support options for customers

Hand in hand with our recent volume discounts and LightSpeed 3.0 release we have started to put in place an improved support capability for customers who need priority support options or may occasionally want to escalate support beyond what we normally offer.

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 :-)

WPF Themes

Today we have released our stylish new product: WPF Themes. Using these themes you can quickly get your applications looking attractive and modern with very little work involved.

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 =)

User feedback – what’s yours?

Omar, a recent new Mindscape customer and LightSpeed user has written a fantastic blog post about his impressions of Mindscape LightSpeed. We always appreciate when our users blog about their experiences with our products – it’s the best form of marketing that a small business can get when selling developer tools. If you write about LightSpeed do let us know, we all get a buzz out of seeing people enjoying our products.

A snippet from Omar’s LightSpeed Review reads:

LightSpeed has changed my mind on how good ORMs can be. The guys at Mindscape are so helpful and work with customers on personal basis and will always take the time to listen to your problems. The support is just great. While I am not saying that LightSpeed is the answer to every problem out there it is definitely a huge leap in the right direction. Keep doing what you do best Mindscape and keep the new functionalities and goodness flowing. If you got me to become an ORM user then I will go as far as saying “NHibernate, you loose”.

You can read the post in its entirety here.

We have always had some testimonials for LightSpeed on the site but have been slow to update that page or to post testimonials for other products (we do get them, we’re just quite busy! :-). So, in an attempt to remedy this situation and to make a bit more noise about the successes that our customers are having with our products we’re looking to publish case studies for users who wish to take part. This can be for any product that we have built – not just LightSpeed.

This is an opportunity to provide us with feedback on what we’re doing right and areas that we can improve. It’s also a good chance to publicize the products you’re building on Mindscape tools or to highlight your business to others looking at using Mindscape tools.

If you’re interested, get in touch by emailing jd@mindscape.co.nz and I’ll send you out a questionnaire that will act as the basis of a case study.

Thanks in advance!