I have been quite since last Friday because my internet connection was down. Sadly there is no happy ending.

Although content with a 1.5 megabit connection I wanted more. So I requested an upgrade to the 20 megabit service.

Ummm….20Mb, I was just drooling at the thought, I could download the entire DotNotRocks podcast archive in double quick time. I like listening to music or podcasts whilst working. Or I could download my overnight email of around 300 messages in a reasonable time, dumping 295 straight into the spam folder.

But no, instead the engineer at the exchange managed to kill my service entirely. So after 30 minutes on hold contacting the customer service department they promised to get another engineer to the exchange to fix it, but not for another 3 working days.

Eventually the 3 days of isolation pass and I get a call from the engineer, he has fixed it up. I check the connection and sure enough, it now works again. Only later do I check the speed and note that actually he has just put it back to the original 1.5Mb speed.

Well thanks mate, you have managed to waste several days and achieve nothing. Mind you, anyone in Australia will not be surprised by this service level from Telstra. So do I request the upgrade again or just sit back and be thankful I have any connection at all? Being a sucker for punishment I will try again.

Krypton 2.4.1 Released
This is a maintenance release containing bug fixes only.

Toolkit Changes
KryptonForm buttons now repaint when you hover
over them. Changing the Text, ExtraText and Icon for
the form also cause an immediate repaint. Plus the
crash that occures on closing down is fixed.

KryptonSplitContainer correctly remembers the
splitter distance between design time and runtime.

KryptonHeader and KryptonHeaderGroup will repaint
correctly when you add them manually and not using
the designer. Most obvious when you had a button spec.

Navigator Changes
Outlook mode separator movement improved, when
moving separator up and down to add/remove items
from stack to the overflow area.

Regards
Component Factory Pty Ltd

Our ribbon now has the ability to place a group in either a normal or collapsed state.

When collapsed a group turns into a button that when pressed will popup a window with the full contents of the group. In the following picture you can see a test where all the groups in the tab are in the collapsed state. When the Page Setup group is pressed you can see the popup below that shows the full contents of the group.

At the moment we cannot add any group content and so it looks a little bare! Still, the important point is that it correctly displays and acts as a hot tracking popup.

To take stock of where we are, I have the following list of features to add for the first release…

1) Quick Access Toolbar
2) Allow definition of content for groups
3) Implement intelligent shrinking of groups
4) Design time functionality

Still quite a long list but we are making good progress with some fundamental features in the bag. With context titles, minimize mode and custom chrome integration already under our belt we must be half way there.

They say all publicity is good publicity and I cannot argue when it is free!

A big thanks to Frederic Milliot of who has written an article about the Krypton Toolkit and had it published in the L’Informaticien magazine. Being a French magazine I cannot understand a word of the article but I assume it is positive!

You can check out the scanned article in these pictures…

Cover Page
Page 58
Page 59
Page 60
Page 62

If you spot any other mentions of Krypton in the press then please let me know.

[b]Krypton 2.4.0 Released[/b]

[b]Toolkit Changes[/b]
Improved custom chrome performance
Improved design time support for ButtonSpecs
Green and Red palettes deprecated
Office 2007 – Auto palette deprecated
Three new predefined button specs added
Several bug fixes

[b]Navigator Changes[/b]
Improved design time support
Multiline and Shrinkline feature added
First tab/checkbutton offset property added

Regards
Component Factory Pty Ltd