Krypton 2.8.5 Released

This release is mostly about fixing bugs, in particular the design time experience as well as the various Toolkit controls that have issues with sizing and drawing. It also contains an additional bonus in the form of three new built-in palettes. These new palettes are inspired by the Vista and Windows Media Player 11 appearance and provide an interesting alternative to the business orientated Office 2007 palettes.

Change highlights
 - New palette Sparkle Blue
 - New palette Sparkle Orange
 - New palette Sparkle Purple
 - Design time exceptions fixed
 - KryptonComboBox bug fixes
 - Plus many other bug fixes

Download 2.8.5 Now

Windows 7 Multi-Touch Technology

Microsoft has been in stealth mode ever since they started working on Windows 7. Given the debacle that was Vista this seems a wise move. We all remember the initial Vista (aka Longhorn) promises that were constantly scaled back. This time they seem to have learned from the mistake and are keeping mum about the feature set. That is until now.

For the first time we have a peek at one of the Windows 7 features, multi-touch support. See it in action here.

Windows Rant

It looks very impressive but I am not convinced at this point that it is anything more than a nice toy. This is the equivalent of the Vista toy called speech recognition. Both of these are great technologies and there are definitely some niche applications that will find them invaluable, but in the real world they are just toys.

Don’t believe me? What percentage of Vista users actually use speech recognition once they finish playing with it for fun? Not many. The same will be true for multi-touch support. After a few weeks I bet you’re still using that traditional mouse and keyboard. Sure you show off the cool photos application to your relatives but then you go back to the mouse for playing Crysis and the keyboard for writing a letter.

Now I wouldn’t mind in the slightest if these toys were added on top of a perfectly stable and efficient base operating system. But it seems to me they’re neglecting the basics to add the marketing fluff.

If you use a Mac or Linux then you will take for granted the ability to have multiple desktop spaces that you can quickly switch between. A simple feature that would take Microsoft about 2 days to implement and yet we don’t have it built in. Sure I can use a third party utility to do this but I shouldn’t have to.

How come I have to pay for Windows Defender? I just paid good money for an operating system and then they want me to pay extra to protect myself against vulnerabilities in their own product! Surely nowadays anti-virus and anti-malware software is considered a base feature of the operating system and not a luxury add-on. Instead I have to pay them or Symantec et al a tax for being connected to the internet.

If you think these do not represent the basics of the system then how about something as simple as the shutdown options. Read the excellent Joel post to see what I mean.

What I want is a world class operating system. It should run for 12 months without needing a reboot or producing a blue screen of death. It should be safe to use connected to the internet and efficient in the use of resources. Once I have that you can stick as many toys on top as you like.

Surely this is not too much to ask from a company with a zillion employees and a zillion dollars in the bank. They recruit enough people from Stanford and MIT that at least the shut down options should be done properly. Microsoft, please please please get Windows 7 right for all our sakes.

Rant over I can go back to watching a Channel 9 video I downloaded. Of course I cannot actually watch it using Windows Media Player 11 on my 64bit Vista. The sound playback works but the video picture does not. So instead I am forced into copying each video I want to watch into a 32bit Vista virtual machine that does playback perfectly. Just another joy of Vista moment that actually brought on the rant in the first place.

Microsoft Source Code Analysis for C#

Microsoft has just released a tool that integrates into Visual Studio and is used to look at your C# source code and report style violations. This is great for any project manager that wants to become style enforcer. The intent is to provide compile time warnings/errors about C# code that violates its rules.

For example, you might want to enforce a rule that all source files have a header at the top containing a copyright notice along with the company name. You can configure the utility so that it produces either a warning or an error whenever this rule is violated. The current list of rules that it comes with can be turned on or off depending of which are applicable to you.

Personally I like the idea and I think it would be a great tool to use on a new project. Everyone of the team can sit down at the start and agree a set of style guidelines that can then be automatically enforced. But on existing projects I think it would be almost pointless, as the number of violations is going to be huge and the time needed to prettify your code not really be justifiable.

Download Current Release
Associated Microsoft Blog

I sometimes get emailed by customers asking where they can get the icons used in my sample applications. I actually bought them from IconExperience a few years ago and they have proved excellent value for money. Decent icons are a must for any professional application and the quickest way to improve the feel of your program.

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At my last permanent job the main objective of the project I worked on was to update the look and feel of the legacy application. The functionality of the software was fine but the user interface was battleship gray and looked very dated. Given that enterprise customers were paying around $500k for the software the potential customers had much higher expectations. For that kind of money the CFO expects it to at least look familiar, they want it to resemble the Excel and Word applications they use all day.

So two of us spent a year updating the front end and created a modern looking professional system with the Office 2007 style appearance. Because we were using a third party control suite the user could even change the themed appearance to some of the other options the vendor provided out of the box. All that was left was to create some new icons that matched modern expectations. The existing ones were 16 color bitmaps created by a programmer many years before. Yes, I really do mean 16 colors and not 16bit color!

You can probably guess what is coming. You won’t believe this but I swear it’s absolutely true. After paying two developers for a year, costing around $160k, my boss would not spend a few thousand getting some professional icons created. Given the functionality of the system it really needed a designer to create custom images, stock icons would not contain the type of specialized icons we needed.

Complete madness. The whole point of the project is to update the front end to compete with competitors that had more modern looking systems. After spending a big chunk of money on development they would not spend a few measly thousand adding the final polish. To this day I imagine some salesman giving a presentation of the app with the Office 2007 Blue color scheme, and there at the top are a row of 16 color bitmaps worthy of a shareware app from 1990. No wonder programmers want to work for themselves.

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You can actually get quite a few free icons if you look around. Here are some links worth investigating…

Mono Factor – 25 Free Vista Icons
Web Appers – Free Web App Icons Set
ZeusBox Studio – Free RSS Feed Icons
VistaIco – Free Vista Style Icons
DryIcons – Free for non-commercial use

Smashing magazine has an article that links to even more resources. Check it out if you want to delve deeper into the free icons scene.

I have finished the new built-in palette and given it the name Sparkle. It is inspired by the glassy look of Vista and the color scheme of Windows Media Player 11. However, note that it is inspired by them and not an exact copy. Here are a few more screen shots to augment those in the last post…

(For some reason Paint Shop Pro is not capturing the cursor when it should be, Column3 has the mouse over it to show the hot tracking effect but the mouse has disappeared)

The actual appearance is better than these pictures which are a bit grainy. But it gives you the general idea. Note that this palette is not really intended for boring line of business applications. You already have Office 2007 style palettes for those types of app. This is intended as a bit more funky and for use in utilities or internal apps where you can be a little more daring!

Right, now onto the 2.8.0 bug fest!