Update: Late afternoon – The servers were back up and running this afternoon.  Phone-based sales and technical support will resume at 9am EDT Wednesday morning.  E-mail and forum technical support have already resumed, and urgent sales e-mails have already been answered.

Update: 3:00pm – Scott just called (and TimP and Pilgrim just msg’d) to let me know that power was back on at the office.  The servers may be down for a short time while they switch them back over to regular power.

Update: 12:05pm – Scott has brought in a generator and restored power to the website and databases.  Phone and e-mail are still down.  Please post all questions to the support forums.  Thanks!

Thanks to a comment from Jim, I realized I should at least put this up so that others wondering the same thing can find the answer.

The remnants of hurricane Ike swept through central Ohio Sunday afternoon, knocking out power to many people and businesses in the area, including Data Dynamics.  Without power the website and phones are out of service.

Once power is restored the office will again be open and we’ll get the website back online as soon as possible.

Today’s beta release brings us one step closer to Data Dynamics Reports v1.1 and we’re adding significant new functionality this release with a set of report items specifically designed to create dashboards.

The dashboards above illustrates the simplicity of the dashboard controls included with Data Dynamics Reports.

Continue reading this post for an explaination of the two new report items included in this build, bullet graph and sparkline.

Bullet Graph

The Bullet Graph concept created by Stephen Few implements the idea of a gauge without the wasted space and color schemes that are not color-blind nor international friendly. The concept is so simple its surprising that gauges are still used.

The example above illustrates the encoding of a KPI as a Bullet Graph. The coloring of the background regions implies that the KPI would be in different states depending on where the value ends up. The value is in the warning area of the bullet graph. A vertical line in the middle of the bullet graph indicates what the target value should be. For this particular example the value is encoded as percent of target so 100% is considered the target.

Sparkline

The sparkline was created by Edward Tufte and is used to display the trend of data over time in a “small” graph. Dashboard for Data Dynamics Reports includes several sparkline variations in the same data region.

The Line sparkline is the typical one seen on market analysis dashboards and should be used when you have a continuous flow of data. Market data, temperature over time, and other cases where the previous value has a large influence on the current value.

The Column sparkline is used when you have discrete data points and not a continuous flow of data. Examples include sports scores, cash register receipts, and other cases where the previous value has little to no influence on the current value.

The Whisker sparkline is typically used in win/loss/tie scenarios or true/false scenarios. Similar to the Column sparkline, but it renders a tie (0 value) in a different fashion.

Additional features will be added to the dashboard over time and these two new controls are just the beginning of the enhancements we are planning on making for Data Dynamics Reports.

I’m way late in posting this. Last Saturday I assisted Luc with getting out the beta for Data Dynamics Analysis. Analysis is the latest in a line of Business Intelligence components that Data Dynamics is creating. Analysis will allow end-users to explore the data within a database, OLAP cube, or dataset and uncover the hidden gems to answer the questions they need to run their business.

The powerful combination of a pivot table with chart analysis allows users to quickly grasp the data they are seeing while the intuitive drag and drop environment allows users to easily create views that answer their questions.

I hope everyone can get a chance to check out the product, it really is an innovative control.

Data Dynamics (and my team) are glad to announce that Data Dynamics Reports is now available for purchase! The team is not out celebrating just yet though, as this post goes live we’re busy putting together what will go into the next release of Data Dynamics Reports.With that in mind, I implore anyone with ideas on what they want to see in the product to let us know. Help the team make the product better by telling us what features you want in the product. I have my own ideas of what features we should implement, but that may not jive with reality. Your feedback will make that happen and make the product better in the process.

I leave early tomorrow morning for TechEd 2007. Shortly after arriving in Orlando some of the Data Dynamics crew will be heading to Party with Palermo, where we’ll be giving out a free copy of ActiveReports for .NET.

Data Dynamics will be at booth #1249 exhibiting our software, including Data Dynamics Reports. Stop by the booth if you have any questions or want to see a demo.

I finally grew tired of the sub-par experience I had with running WordPress on a windows server. Long ago, I signed up for a wordpress.com blog so that I could use Akismet, so I’ve had this site sitting dormant since then.

Finally various features I’ve been wanting to use are available to me: semantic permalinks (look ma, no query strings!), trackbacks and pingbacks now work, and behind the scenes I can now use the built-in upload feature.

The downside of the move is that I can no longer edit the template at will…but its a trade-off I’m willing to make for now.

I’ve created a script to redirect requests from the old domain to this one…and at some point in time I will also redirect blog.misterdotnet.com over here as well.

Luc and I just flew back in today from the Tulsa Tech Fest. The event was awesome and will provide for lots of stories on Monday.

Highlights from TechFest:

• We met a ton of people. I was so busy during the lunch period talking about Data Dynamics and our products that I didn’t get a chance to eat much of my food. That was not a problem
• We gave our presentation to a total of 3 people; 2 less than I thought we would have. That is just a sign of the great sessions going on at the same time.
• Despite only giving a detailed presentation to 3 people we got our product and company name out there to many other people. There was a central theme of people complaining about a certain competitor *cough* wanting to find a better solution…Just so you know…we have it
• Mark Miller’s component presentation was pretty good, I know some people didn’t ‘get’ it until the very end…I thank my background in knowing about services and the XNA component based development helped me though
• We gave away all of the t-shirts we brought to the event!
• The VIP dinner featured some damn good barbecue from Rib Crib in Tulsa….excellent food
• Luc was interviewed for .NET Rocks! by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell!!! I’m a HUGE fan of the show, so for Luc to be interviewed about Data Dynamics and our products has a big wow factor for me. At the top of this post is a picture from my cellphone of the interview. From left to right: .NET Rocks hosts Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell, and Data Dynamics Product Manager Luc. The show will be posted the week of November 14th 21st. Here is Luc’s post about the interview.

Some of the non-TechFest highlights:

• Due to a dumb James moment, I caused Luc and myself to miss our 6pm flight from Houston, TX to Tulsa, OK.
• On the upside, we met Bryan Powell while waiting for the later 7:30pm flight to Tulsa. Bryan provided a lot of laughs and made the time pass quickly.
• The Post Oak Lodge (located at 5323 W 31st Street North, Tulsa, OK) in Tulsa is incredible! I’m ready to go back there next year.
• I must have a familiar face, several people came up and said they know me from somewhere…from this blog or my CodeProject articles maybe?

The only downside really is that as we were rushing to get to our flight from Tulsa to Atlanta, we ran into Mark Miller and Richard Campbell again, and didn’t have a long time to talk with Mark about the session I went to. I think they were rushing to get to their plane(s) as well. At least I’m now known as the ISupportInitialize guy

*Yes I know I used the phrases “we” and “us” a lot…bad habit on my part but Luc and I were together pretty much the whole weekend so its all stored that way in my head…I’m not turning into royalty just yet.

Saturday, October 14th, 2006 is the Tulsa TechFest. Data Dynamics is a proud sponsor of the event and we’ll be there to answer any questions about our products and give demos at our exhibit booth. We’ll even be giving a presentation about our .NET products.

Edit: Bumping this up to the top. Luc also confirmed that we’ll be speaking at the event, we’ll talk a little bit about our .NET products but the focus will be on ActiveReports for .NET 3.0. We’ve also donated some raffle prizes…a license to each of our .NET products: ActiveReports for .NET 3.0 Standard, SharpUI for .NET, and SharpGraph for .NET

After seeing that there was only one thing left on my list and it wasn’t important I’ve decided to release BetterMenu tonight.

BetterMenu Source (156 KB)
BetterMenu Demo (126 KB)

What is BetterMenu?

BetterMenu is a component you can add to a .NET application which adds images and custom drawing to menus based on the MainMenu and ContextMenu controls. Unlike regular custom drawing of menus this component handles MDI applications with menu merging and using the MDI List menu option. Also included is a component that is used by BetterMenu to make sense of the MdiChildActivate event.

License

Copyright (c) 2004-2006, James T. Johnson
ImageIndexEditor/Converter Copyright (c) 2004, Eugene Pankov
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

The images used by the menu items in the Demo application are not covered by this license which is why they are not included as separate files.

A brief how-to follows the break.

How to use BetterMenu

Getting started

First things first, you need to add the BetterMenu component to your toolbox. With a Windows Form open go to your toolbox and right click on the tab you wish to add the component to. Choose “Choose Items” or “Add/Remove Items” depending on what version of Visual Studio you are using. Choose the browse tab or click the browse button and select the MrDotNet.BetterMenu.dll assembly from the demo or the one you built from source.

The BetterMenu component works by using the IExtenderProvider interface provided by the .NET framework. This lets the component add psuedo-properties to other controls on the design surface. For more information about IExtenderProvider I have written an article about it on CodeProject.

Using BetterMenu

The advantage this component has over similar ones is that you don’t have to do anything different to start taking advantage of the component. Once you drop it on the form the MenuItems on the form will have the properties you need to control the way the menu looks. Most of it should be easy to figure out, the Image property on the menu item will dictate the image that should be drawn next to the menu item. The ImageIndex property works with the ImageList properites on the BetterMenu component.

If you use the Image property or don’t assign Hot/Disabled image lists hot/disabled images will be created by the component.

The Description property controls the rich menu and textual separator behavior. If the menu is already a separator (that is the Text property is set to “-”) then setting the Description property will turn it into a textual separator. For other menu items the menu becomes a rich menu with a description beneath the main text of the item describing what it does. The EnableExtension property is a trick so that even if you don’t set any other properties the menu will still look like the others because of the custom drawing.

Speaking of drawing

If you want to customize the drawing process you can do that. First, create a new class inheriting from the abstract MrDotNet.BetterMenu.MenuDrawer. Then attach an event handler to the BetterMenu’s GetDrawer event and return an instance of your drawer. This should only be called once after the BetterMenu’s menu style is changed so you could keep state in the drawer. And since I’ve already hinted at it, the MenuStyle is a funky little property on the BetterMenu component.

While it appears to be an instance property, changing it to anything but Global will change a static property and all current instances of the BetterMenu will update themselves to the new menu style. Why the complexity? When you have an MDI application and use menu merging the BetterMenu component on the child form is still responsible for drawing the menu items. So if you change the style on the parent form but the child form doesn’t update, then you can have some menus drawn with a custom drawer and others drawn with the Office XP style.

I plan on writing a full article for CodeProject explaining the internals…then again I’ve said that for 2 years now

Enjoy!

Update: I forgot to include Eugene’s copyright on the source for the ImageIndexConverter and ImageIndexEditor I borrowed from his MenuItem Extender article

I haven’t posted much lately because I’ve been rather busy wrapping up my duties at my current job.  Monday I drive down to Columbus, Ohio to start a new job; working in the support department at Data Dynamics.  Work on the Syntax Highlighter for .NET will continue; but not until I find a more permanent place to live down there.  Both my bug tracking and source control are on a box that I won’t be able to take with me so I’ve got to transfer that to my ‘gaming’ pc.

Posting will be more sporadic than before; but I hope that will change once I get settled in.

Have a happy new year everyone!