ToolStrip positions won’t save? Give them a name!

Tonight, I was working on an application using the ActiveReports designer control.

While I was working on it, I thought it would be nice to save the position of the ToolStrips for the user and reload them, since there are quite a few toolstrips to deal with.

Microsoft was nice enough to include a couple methods that do this for you as part of Windows Forms: ToolStripManager.SaveSettings(Form) and ToolStripManager.LoadSettings(Form).

Nice!  Just a few lines of code hooked to the Load and Closing events and voilà! Saving and loading of my ToolStrip positions!  I ran it once, to get those settings saved.  But then I ran it again, and all my ToolStrips disappeared!  WTF?!?

Time for a change

This week, I turned in my notice to ComponentOne/GrapeCity that I accepted a position with another company.

I’ll be joining my friend and former co-worker, Lucas Hardbarger, at InfoPlanIT LLC working as a Senior Developer/Consultant. There, I’ll be putting to use my expertise with .NET, ActiveReports, and GrapeCity ActiveAnalysis to enhance their existing product line as well as create custom solutions for their clients.

I got my start at ComponentOne/GrapeCity by joining Data Dynamics, Ltd. 7 years ago as a new Tech Support Engineer, 3 months later I moved up to a Junior Product Manager and before the end of my first year I was the Product Manager for Data Dynamics Reports.

A month or two before we announced that GrapeCity was buying out Data Dynamics, Lucas announced he was leaving Data Dynamics for InfoPlanIT. That is when I took over the Product Manager duties for bringing ActiveAnalysis to 2.0. I then continued in this role through the acquisition by GrapeCity up until the first maintenance release when I turned the product over to Shalini, one of my co-workers in our India office.

Shortly after this we turned our attention to ActiveReports 7, where I worked with Raji and Sergey from the original Data Dynamics team and several from our Japan branch.

Last July we announced that GrapeCity had bought out ComponentOne. Later that month, after a year and a half of development, we released ActiveReports 7 (after a hasty update of the product to match the new ComponentOne branding).

And that brings us to today. To leave after 7 years is bittersweet, but it’s time to move on to other things. This will be different for me, but I’m looking forward to it!

ActiveReports 7 Now Available!

Its done!  ActiveReports 7 is now available for everyone to download and purchase!  This release has been a long time coming, with work beginning back in October of 2010, if I remember correctly.

So much work has gone into this release. I’m proud of what the team has accomplished.

Now that we have released in the U.S., we aren’t resting just yet. We are already hard at work on the next version, which will be the basis for our release in Japan!

The major new feature in ActiveReports 7 is Fixed Page Layout. This new layout option gives developers a way of easily creating paper form designs like you see in invoices and bills as well as those ubiquitous tax forms from the IRS!

Below is the announcement that was posted to the forums just a short while ago!

ComponentOne, a division of GrapeCity!

Today, GrapeCity has announced that it has acquired ComponentOne!  You can find the news elsewhere…but what I’m excited about is the opportunities we’ll have in the future to make our components even better and leverage our knowledge across the company.

So far we don’t have any plans (and I probably couldn’t talk about them anyway), but the potential is HUGE!  I can’t wait to put my proposals out there and see what the rest of the company thinks!

Want $200? Help us find issues in ActiveReports Developer 7!

[I have no idea how this didn't get posted, it was originally slated to go up the morning I made the forum post back in May]

We want ActiveReports Developer 7 to have the best launch possible!  Experience has told us that no matter how much testing we perform, our users are always using the product in ways we haven’t thought of before.

To help us provide the best launch possible we’re asking users to test the product within their own applications and let us know what they find.  To sweeten the deal, we’re offering up four $200 Amazon.com gift cards to the users who find the most issues.  Details are available in the forum announcement post!

ActiveReports Developer 7 beta 3, now available!!!

Beta 3 of ActiveReports Developer 7 is now available for download!

http://downloads.datadynamics.com/misc/ar7-beta-7.0.4826.0.zip

This beta release includes the following new features and fixes:

• ActiveReports Developer 7 now loads in Visual Studio 2012 RC. This support is beta-quality while Visual Studio is still unreleased. Please let us know of any issues you run into.
• An updated barcode control
  • Now make use of DataMatrix
  • Intelligent Mail Barcode (the PostNet barcode is being discontinued by the US Postal Service and replaced with IMB)
  • GS1 Databar Limited
  • 2/5-digit Addons for UPC/EAN symbologies
• A potential memory leak in the web viewer control has been fixed
• (Case 162691) The designer control no longer draws incorrectly when hosted in the .NET tab control
• Opening of complex page reports is now faster
• VS2010 help is now installed with the setup if it is present on your computer
• …and many more issues have been fixed internally!

Reminder: Participate in the beta bug bounty and you could earn one of 4 $200 USD Amazon.com gift cards! Details and rules are in the bounty announcement post.

New beta of ActiveReports Developer 7, now available!!!

I just posted the newest build of ActiveReports Developer 7 to the web.  This new build fixes numerous issues that were reported internally as well as adds a new CharWrap mode to implement Kinsoku line wrapping for Japanese text.

Download the new build today!