Please join me in welcoming Billy to the Component Factory team. You can see Billy watching over my shoulder as we start our first pair programming exercise to get him up to speed on the Krypton code. Once his initial training is completed Billy will be handling all technical support calls.

Billy is a 10 week old Galah (a Cockatoo native to Australia) that has been hand reared and so is completely tame. The Galah is a very good mimic and over time should be able to speak a variety of words. He can also live up to 40 years old and so looks like being a permanent member of the family.

I tried an experiment with twitter and found it did not really help my life. Here is another experiment. I have added myself into LinkedIn with the idea it will build up a network of contacts that will be useful into the future. If you are also on LinkedIn then you can check out my profile and connect up…

LinkedIn Profile

I want to quickly clarify my development priorities for the future. There seems to be concern that with my post about Silverlight/WPF yesterday that the usual Krypton work has slipped down my list of priorities. So let me clarify my immediate and longer term plans.

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.

After more than 4 years with the same design the Component Factory website is ready for a facelift. So I am calling out to my blog readers to see if any are web designers or know someone who is.

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

Nothing ever goes wrong in isolation. The family of problems has countless brothers and sisters and they are ready to trip you up at every opportunity. With the release of Windows 7 I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade my Vista machine to the latest and greatest. But what should have taken a couple of hours turned into a long weekend.

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.