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.

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

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

This post is long overdue.  It’s been too long since I have posted last, but I figured this was just the post to break the hiatus.

I want to give a shout out to the Live Writer team at Microsoft for shipping Beta 2. 

You can download the installer for Writer Beta 2 at http://writer.live.com.

JJ, Charles, Spike, Bonnie, Joe, Rebecca, Sophy, Pooja, Ron, & Flora, CONGRATULATIONS!

If you’re reading this, have your own blog that you post to, and don’t use Writer, try it out.  That team knows how to ship kick ass software!

One of the problems I ran into when I first started using apps within Office 2007, such as Word and Excel, was finding certain commands within the Ribbon which replaces the long used toolbar + menu UI. 

For those that haven’t started using Office 2007 yet and don’t know what I am referring to, below is a screenshot of the ribbon used by Word.  Notice that the usual menus for File, Edit, View, etc. are no longer available.

When the time comes that you switch over to Office 2007, I think the following will be very helpful.  Below are links to command reference guides that show you where to find commands within Office 2007 apps.  The command reference guides do this by showing you the 2003 version of the app for selecting your command, and from that, maps you to the command within the Ribbon UI of the 2007 version.  They are very helpful.

Interactive:  Word 2003 to Word 2007 command reference guide

Interactive:  Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 command reference guide

For more information on the Ribbon, follow the link below.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100898951033.aspx