For those interested in the new Office 2010 palettes or maybe the new KryptonGroupBox control you can download the Beta of the upcoming 4.1 release from here…

Download Beta

Office 2010 Blue
Here we have the blue theme in active and inactive states…

Notice that the background of the  tabs area also changes with the window activation change. This gives a more consistent feel and makes the ribbon feel part of the window itself because its colour always matches that of the window chrome in the caption area above it. Also note the application button has been replaced with an application tab that is positioned at the start of the tabs area. New properties have been added allowing you to change the default blue colour and default File text.

On the far right of the tabs line you can see a new upwards pointing button. This is used to switch between minimized and full modes and is now present by default for all palettes. There is a new property that allows this to be turned hidden if you prefer to save the space. I think the button is a great idea as most end users are unlikely to discover that double clicking tabs with toggle the minimized mode.

If you look careful you might also have spotted that the cluster buttons no longer show with borders around them. Previously they would have a border around each button but now there is no border unless you actually move the mouse over the button. Instead each cluster has a small separator next to them so they are delineated from other group contents.

Give yourself a pat on the back if you have spotted this final change. Although not obvious the font is half a point smaller than under the Office 2007 themes and this allows more content to fit within the same space.

Office 2010 Silver/Black
Just like Office 2007 there are three themes in total and they are based on the same blue/silver and black base colours…

Aero Glass Support
Under Vista and Windows 7 the ribbon draws a little different to take advantage of the glass look and feel. Here you can see the blue scheme under Windows 7…

The window chrome has been extended downwards over the tabs area. In order to ensure the text for the tabs can still be read the background has a light gradient that extends upwards so that the darker text stands out. I have not managed to draw this exactly the same way as Office 2010 does but it is pretty close.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they do not make any changes between this Beta and the final release. Otherwise I will need to make additional changes. But as they have added all three schemes I expect that any changes are now going to be very minor.

Now onto the task of updating the rest of the controls with new settings.

Windows 7
The updated Microsoft Paint uses the Windows 7 ribbon control that is provided with the operating system. You can see straight away that it has done away with the application button as an orb and replaced it with a more traditional style button. The groups have also changed and now use a separator on the right hand side instead of having a box drawn around each one.

Office 2010 Technical Preview
This screenshot was taken from an installation inside a virtual machine and so it does not have any Aero glass for the borders. Ignoring that detail we can see that Office 2010 also has a button instead of an orb for the application button. Also note that the button clusters inside the Font group no longer have a border around the buttons themselves. The border only appears when you move the mouse over them.

Office 2010 Beta
This Beta release is only slightly different from the previous technical preview. The main change has been the application button changing to have the more familiar File as its name. I presume that end users find it easier to relate to the traditional File menu option.

Another change that cannot be seen in the screenshots is that the Beta has three color schemes. These are Silver, Blue and Black of which the above screenshot is the Silver variation. So I think the best approach is to add three new palettes that represent those three new schemes. Although only a Beta I believe the fact they have added all three colors means they are pretty much finished in creating the visuals.

Priority One
My number one priority is Krypton. My number two and number three priorities are also Krypton. Maybe I should have pointed out that it took about a year to go from playing with Silverlight/WPF to actually having the MetaPanel control up and working as it is today. As you can see, it was very much a low priority background activity. I have been and will continue to dedicate 5 days per week to Krypton. But where possible I will continue to play around and learn Silverlight/WPF and maybe from time to time a useful control will emerge from that effort.

Version 4.0 of Krypton has been a real milestone for me because it completes the initial roadmap I created when I first started Component Factory four years ago. My original goal was to create a docking  system. To create the docking system would require the Workspace component. But to create the Workspace I first needed the Navigator. Hence the order in which I created those components was the order of dependency to build up to the docking system itself.

Krypton 4.1
So what next for Krypton? The current development work is building towards version 4.1 and will include a few smaller changes rather than one big change. Already completed is the new Toolkit control KryptonGroupBox. I will be adding a Windows 7 palette, updating the ribbon so it can display like the Windows 7 ribbon and adding the usual raft of bug fixes. There might be extra changes on top of this depending on the actual timing of the release.

Krypton 4.X
So what is the next major component to be added? Actually I have no idea at the moment. Should it be gauge controls a tree control or maybe something completely new that no other vendor has? This is where your feedback comes into play. Maybe I should email out a survey to find out? Or maybe it should not be a major component but instead I should spend several months just adding another 10 unique palettes? I have no preference and am happy to work on whatever the market indicates is the most needed.

But I do think that given enough time it will gradually take over because of the extra power and flexibility it provides. Silverlight 3 now makes it possible to build desktop quality applications for the web which has the potential to really drive the adoption of XAML and WPF.

So to make sure I don’t completely miss the boat I need to start playing around with Silverlight/WPF and coming up with ideas for components. Given that Silverlight/WPF will be around for at least a decade it makes sense to create some controls or components that have a long potential lifetime of use. Write once and sell for a decade feels like a good business model. It also makes sense to start with components that can be used as building blocks for creating bigger and better components in the future.

The first result of my experimenting is an animating panel that this pluggable. This MetaPanel control is intended to solve two related problems. First is the problem of changing panel layouts. If you want to alter the layout of children between a WrapPanel to a StackPanel you need to create the StackPanel, move all the children across and then remove the old WrapPanel. Not difficult but a painful process.

The MetaPanel control instead has a pluggable layout algorithm so that you can switch the layout without having to create a new control. This is a much easier process to manage and also makes it easy for the developer to create custom pluggable layout algorithms for specialized scenarios.

The second problem is one of animation. As panel children are moved to new locations it would be nice to have some form of animation in order to give the user visual feedback. If you are moving all the children from one panel control to another this becomes very difficult to achieve. But as our children are always children of our single MetaPanel it becomes very easy. Whenever the layout is changed we animate the children to new positions. In fact the animation algorithm is also pluggable allowing maximum flexibility in specifying different animation requirements. With the layout and animation being pluggable you can see why I named it MetaPanel.

Use this MetaPanel TestPage link to see a simple Silverlight application that allows you to play around with the control. You should see something like the following…

Use the top row to add and remove child items.
Use the second row to change the layout algorithm.
Use the third row to alter layout specific values.
Use the last row to alter animation settings.

Well now you can use the all new KryptonGroupBox control. Just like the standard windows forms control it draws a caption text over the top of a group border. Here you see an instance in the default Office 2007 Blue palette.

You can actually specify two strings plus an image for the caption.

Or move the caption to one of the other three edges.

By default the border edge is indented 50% of the height of the caption area. If you specify 100% then you get the left image below and a value of 0% gives the variation on the right.

The KryptonGroupBox is a simple little control but that does not make it any less useful in your Toolkit.

New for Version 4.0
   – VS2010 Style Docking system
   – KryptonWrapLabel
   – KryptonSeparator
   – Workspace persistence
   – Workspace max/restore feature
   – Various bug fixes

Change Lists
  – Toolkit
  – Navigator
  – Workspace
  – Ribbon

Here is a list of websites of my competition.
   ComponentOne
   DevExpress
   Infragistics

You should feel you can create graphics of the same standard as the competition using the fairly detailed spec that I will provide. The actual page content is of course provided by myself when the actual site pages are built out. Your main skill should be graphic design with some additional knowledge of HTML/CSS creation.

And how much will I pay? I think $2000 (USD) to complete the initial design would be about right. That equates to $40 an hour for 50 hours of work. I think that would definitely cover all the time needed as the initial design is just a single master page. I will then pay for additional pages to be built that vary from the master page. These would have extra graphics or special elements on the page and so need extra design work.

This project would suit a professional that wants to make some extra pocket money on a side project or maybe a freelancer that has some spare hours in the schedule. Just email me directly using the following address to put yourself forward.

phil.wright@componentfactory.com

Reduced Product Line-up
Something like 90% of all sales are for the full Krypton Suite and so I intend to simplify the list of product offerings by selling only the full Suite. Existing customers with the Navigator, Workspace or Ribbon that are still within their 12 month subscription will get a free upgrade to the Suite + Source. So no customers will miss out because of the change in policy.

The Suite will also only be offered with the full source code included so the ability to buy just a license is being removed. Most companies want the source code anyway and so this reduces the number of purchase options making it a simpler decision. So the purchase page is going to have just the Krypton Suite + Source with the only options being the number of licenses you want to buy.

BARGAIN ALERT: Yes, that means you could buy the Navigator at $149 before next Wednesday and get a free upgrade to the full Suite including the source code. Reading my blog means you get the inside track and your reward is a truly once in a lifetime bargain. Or why not get a 4 pack and save even more!

New Pricing
Currently the Suite + Source is priced at $399 (USD) and the new price with the docking system added will be $499 (USD). Looking at other comparable products on the market I still think this is a reasonable price given the extra flexibility and features it offers.

New Licence Options
Last is a change to provide customers with an upper limit on costs. I hope this will tempt more of the larger outfits to consider buying the Suite for the entire development department. I am introducing Site and Enterprise license options.

A Site license will allow an unlimited number of developers within your organization but limited to one geographic location. An Enterprise license allows for an unlimited number of developers at an unlimited number of locations for your organization. Customers with 16 or more licenses at the moment will be offered the chance to convert to either the Site or Enterprise depending on their licenses requirements.

Changes in Beta 2
- Drag reordering for Navigator/Workspace/Docking
- Docking now has a dockable Navigator
- KryptonWrapLabel added to Toolkit

Download Beta 2

Luckily for me I had read a blog post by Hanselman indicating that you should uninstall Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 before upgrading to Win7. So I did just that. Then I uninstalled the  C++ 2010 Redistributable which had been installed along with VS2010. Unluckily for me I did not read his post very carefully because it says you should reboot between the first uninstall and the second. Oh well, surely rebooting after uninstalling both would be fine?

I soon discovered the importance of that missed reboot when pretty much every application on my machine stopped working. All of them demanding a DLL that no longer exists. So I tried to reinstall the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 hoping it would put back the missing file. Sadly this was not going to happen because even the installer refused to run without our now notorious DLL. Oh well, instead of an upgrade I would bite the bullet and just perform a clean install of Win7. Probably for the best anyway.

After several attempts to boot from my Win7 DVD I slapped my large forehead as I suddenly realized my mistake. I had simply copied all the Win7 files onto the DVD and so made it a data disc. I should have burnt the ISO directly to the disk so it was bootable. Oh well, easy enough to correct.

Installing Windows 7 is simple and surprisingly quick. I had my fresh OS up and running in around 30 minutes. My first task was to get connected to the inter-tubes and check for any updates or new drivers etc. But hang on, I cannot see the Internet or indeed my local network either. After much gnashing of teeth it turns out that no matter what I do the OS refuses to accept there is a relevant driver for my ethernet card. I’ve had a separate PCI Ethernet card for some months, ever since a power surge caused the two controllers provided on the motherboard to die. I’m guessing the cheap and cheerful card I am using is so cheap and cheerful that Windows 7 cannot bear to use it.

A quick trip down town and I manage to find a store that actually sells an Ethernet card. I also manage to pick up a nice looking Western Digital 1TB external hard drive. Obviously after all the weekend trauma I had to cheer myself up with a new toy. So I swap over the Ethernet controllers and bish bash bosh, its up and working. Great, now I can play with the new toy instead.

My motherboard comes with an eSata connection and so does the 1TB external drive. Given how slow my existing USB based external drive feels I’m really looking forward to some serious improvement. So I take out the cables that came with the 1TB drive and guess what? Yep, there is no eSata to eSata cable supplied. The drive has an eSata port and the computer has an eSata port but is there a cable that has eSata at both ends? No chance. So until I get a cable I’m still stuck with a slow USB connection between them.

Just when I see light at the end of the tunnel I meet the final obstacle. When installing the various applications I need for building Krypton I meet the dreaded, you must activate this product online, issue. And because my machine configuration has changed since I first installed those apps they refuse to activate. So now I have to email support people in order to get them to let me install the software. To their credit Innovasys were very quick and got my Help Studio 3 and Document X! apps up and running in a couple of hours.

Unfortunately my experience with PreEmptive in order to get Dotfuscator up and working is less impressive. I was awoken at 4am by a call from someone in Europe to ask about the problem. The caller even asked if I liked living in Australia so there is no excuse for not realizing I would be in bed! It is now 24 hours since I emailed their support and still have not been able to get it activated. Luckily I don’t need to build a release at the moment.

The feature works with all the Navigator modes that display elements per-page. So any of the modes that have tabs, ribbon tabs or check buttons per-page can be reordered. Even the Outlook modes have the ability as they contain a set of check buttons at the bottom of the control.

I would show some screenshots but there is no effective way of showing it working. Just wait until the docking beta 2 in a couple of week’s time and then you can play with it.

I did make a couple of other minor changes. First of all the background of the control is transparent instead of using the controls BackColor property. I also uses the palette text rendering hint so that the text has the same appearance as text everywhere else in the Krypton Toolkit. You can see the result in this image…

At the top is a KryptonWrapLabel and at the bottom a standard windows forms Label.

You can start the app but running the Krypton Explorer, selecting the Applications tab and then using the Krypton Serial Keys link. Here you can see it running on my development machine.

The bottom of the screen lists all the currently registered serial keys in the registry. To register a new key just enter it into the text box and use the register button. If it succeeds then the bottom section will update to show it.

So when a new release is made in the future you can uninstall, install the latest version and then run this app to register your new serial key. Then you should be able to load up and build your application without further actions.

NOTE: No, the serial keys in the image are not valid; they were randomly generated strings for demo purposes only!

Download Beta

As a beta release I do not recommend using this in a commerical application. It should be used for experimenting only. I anticipate at least one more beta before the full Suite 4.0 release is ready. I would certainly appreciate any feedback on bugs, missing functionality or any advice on how it could be improved. If there is any area that needs more explaining in the documentation or an extra sample to demonstrate something tricky then just drop me a line. I will setup a forum just for this beta release so that would be a good place to note bugs etc.

The beta version number is 3.5.4 so it will work with all existing 3.5 serial keys. Although the docking component is the headline change there are also numerous bug fixes and updates across the other components.

Change Summary
- Docking component
- Workspace persistence
- Workspace cell maximize/restore
- KryptonSeparator added to Toolkit

Known Issues
- Drag reordering of tabs not implemented
- Occasional crash with floating windows

How do you enter the serial key?  How do I ensure the latest key is being used? How do I to handle licensing on a build machine? Why am I getting a license the first time my app starts on a new machine? 

Clearly the current mechanism is just not good enough. So I propose changing the licensing system for the next release to make it super easy for customers to enter the key and license their applications. But what system to use? Roll my own from scratch, modify the existing system or buy an commercial solution?

I’m looking for feedback on your experience with licensing systems to see if there is a good one that people would recommend. It must be able to support the following requirements…

• Work with a component library
• Easy customer entry of license keys
• Not validate against machine settings
• Not validate against a server

It takes a set of custom palettes and compiles them into your assembly for ease of use. You can check it out here…

I get a fair number of questions from people that are confused because of the dependencies that exist. If you buy the Workspace you automatically get the Navigator. With Docking it will get more confusing because it will come with Workspace and Navigator because they are both dependencies of the Docking system. This confusion would be completely removed by having just the Krypton Suite which has everything provided.

Of course I would need to give all existing customers a free upgrade to the full Suite but I am sure those customers would be happy with the change! Any thoughts?

I’ve removed the twitter gadget from the blog sidebar and hope never to use the service again.

Twitter is dead to me.

SaveConfigToXml/LoadConfigFromXml
SaveConfigToArray/LoadConfigFromArray
SaveConfigToStream/LoadConfigFromStream
To allow maximum flexibility you can also persist configurations to xml streams, bytes arrays and arbitrary streams. Using byte arrays is really useful if you want to store configs inside a database. You can easily convert a byte array to and from base64 and so have it stored as a string.

GlobalSaving/GlobalLoading
Extensibility is provided via a set of events. Use these two events to add your own custom data into the configuration data. Adding your own custom arbritary information into the docking config might serve as the only persistence mechanism needed for your entire application.

PageSaving/PageLoading
Store per-page custom information using this pair of events. For example, your page might represent a file and so you could use the PageSaving event to store the name of the file the page is displaying. On loading you use the PageLoading to associate the file with a page and  initialize the page contents.

When a docking configuration is being loaded the process begins by creating a list of all the current pages inside the docking hierarchy. Then the entire contents of the hierarchy are reset. So all floating windows are killed, auto hidden groups wiped and docked windows removed. Now the config is loaded to create new floating window, auto hidden groups and so forth as defined in the config.

Each time a page definition is found in the config it attempts to reuse any existing page with that same unique name. So if the page existed at the time of the load operation and the config refers to that page it will simply be reused. The PageLoading event is fired so the existing page can be modified if required by event handlers based on any custom data that is stored with the page config.

RecreateLoadingPage
If the configuration contains details of a page that does not exist in the current hierarchy at load time then this event is fired so that an appropriate page can be created. If you want the config page ignored then you can cancel the event.

OrphanedPages
Once the config has been reloaded there might be pages that were in the hierarchy before the load but were not inside the config itself. These are orphan pages in that they are no longer part of the docking system as they were removed but never added back again. This event is fired at the end of the load process and gives a list of all these orphan pages. This event is useful if you need to perform extra processing for a page that is no longer needed, such as closing file handles or releasing other resources.

The above set of events allows two common scenarios to be handled. Applications that have a constant set of docking pages can easily be saved and reloaded without needing to handle any events. As the loading config will always refer to every docking page it means that all the pages are preserved after loads. Applications that have a dynamic set of pages are handled easily by using the RecreateLoadingPage and OrphanedPages events.

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.