My latest task at work involves UI development with some heavy duty charting.  At first, I pushed for investigating the use of Silverlight for the project.  After all, I spent enough time within the walls of Microsoft to taste the ”Kool-Aid” and believe in their teams and products.  At this time though, it’s way too early in Silverlight’s lifecycle for it to be of use for us.  It was almost immediately obvious that it will not be suitable our needs as we needed some heavyweight charting abilities that Silverlight just doesn’t have built in at this time. 

Flex, on the other hand, has a great charting API available right out of the box, and I must say, I am very impressed.  My initial inclination was that Flex was not going to be easy to work with, as I have done a minimal set of Flash work in the past and was frustrated with working within the platform.  Although, that was many, many years ago.  Flex, in conjunction with ActionScript 3, is much more straightforward to program in and get something up and running.  After installing Adobe Flex Builder 2, I was able to get a sample chart coded up in about 15 minutes.   

A couple weeks down the road since then, I have been “Flexing” away, customizing and tweaking some nice looking charts.  With the richness of the UI Flex offers, many of the controls have a ton of default highlight alphas, fill alphas, theme coloring, etc. that can easily become overwhelming to tweak for those that are not the most design savvy.  I came across the following tool that has been a great help in tweaking the look and feel of the Flex controls.  It’s called, Flex Style Explorer.  Within the explorer, you can change the styles of Flex controls and see that change updated dynamically right in front of you, so that you can see how the different UI options within the control behave relative to each other. 

If you are new to Flex, check it out.

Congratulations to the Writer team that just shipped Windows Live Beta 3. 

Joe, from the Writer team, has the details of the release over at his blog where you will read about the Insert Video feature that I just tried out quickly (see below). 

This video from You Tube never fails to crack me up.  Thanks to Charles for finding this gem long ago.

Looking forward to seeing the Writer bits going final.

One of my latest tasks at work is getting a continuous build environment up and running.  After doing some research, I’ve decided on using the Cruise Control.NET framework to manage the process. 

To get things started, I have been following Joe Field’s blog post on CruiseControl.NET from Scratch.  It’s a great resource for getting Cruise Control initially set up and then tweaking from there.

CNET has a cool online tool that will test your bandwidth connection and report the results back to you.  All you have to do is enter your area code and provider for a ranked result set that will tell you how your speed compares to what your provider is providing.

CNET Bandwidth Meter speed test

Thanks for the link, Charles.

Coding Horror has a great post with links to previous posts that walk you through the process of building your own PC from scratch.  I’m sure there are other resources on the web that are helpful for completing such a task, but the series of posts from Coding Horror is definitely one of the more detailed and easy to follow set of directions as I have seen.  He also covers overclocking.

As Joe Cheng has highlighted, now is as good a time as any to upgrade your PC. 

One of the best resources for ordering parts for a PC is NewEgg.  Their prices are always close to the best you can find, if not the best, but what the lose in pricing they make up for in shipping reliability and other customer oriented things such as returns, etc.

Coding Horror: Building a PC, Part IV: Now It’s Your Turn

I completely agree with Brad’s assessment of the Facebook problem. 

The Problem: As of today, Facebook is deriving massive benefit in all the application development that they?ve enabled.  They?ve brilliantly created an open community that allows developers to quickly create applications that can rapidly acquire hundreds of thousands of users.  This dramatically extends the functionality of Facebook by offloading the R&D and feature development to the apps developers.  (How about all of them there adverbs ? I sound like a press release.) However, as far as I can tell, none of these Facebook apps developers are deriving any real benefits (if you are a Facebook apps developer and ARE deriving a tangible benefit, other than customer acquisition within the Facebook infrastructure, please weigh in.)  In addition, Facebook has shifted all of the infrastructure costs to these apps developers, creating the “I have 250,000 users, now what?? problem.

I think it’s great that developers of these apps will create them for the good of the community.  This happens often, but I think the quality of apps created for use within the Facebook platform will be that much better if developers of these apps were compensated economically, especially within the current Facebook environment that requires developers of these apps to host them on their own.

Feld Thoughts - The Facebook Problem

Silverlight looks really cool and interesting.  I’ll have to give it a better look over in some free time. 

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Silverlight on Linux - Miguel de Icaza’s moonlight project

We’ll have spotlights on excellent tech and tutorial posts from the forum, columns like ?Gamers? Gamut? and ?Girl Tech, Girl Talk? that users can submit articles to, contests for serious EggXpert swag, and more!  

EggXpert.com: The Key to a Smarter Community

Thanks to Joe for forwarding along the link.

Coding Horror has published a great, detailed post on how to clean spyware off of your machine if it ever gets infested. 

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000888.html

The directions he outlines are probably a little overwhelming for the average computer user at home.  For average computer users that I know, when they ask about protecting against adware/spyware, I usually point them to Ad-Aware and Spybot.  Installing and running those on a regular basis should keep adware/spyware at bay.

In Oracle, when order by descending is used, null values are returned to the top.  To work around this, you just use NULLS LAST in your ORDER BY statement inside of your stored procedure.

Example:

SELECT name FROM customer ORDER BY name DESC NULLS LAST;

where “name” is a column in the “customer” table and ”DESC” is used to set a descending order