or…what I’ve been spending my weekends and early morning hours working on.

If you’ve read many of the early posts on this blog you’d see that I’m an avid gamer, and that I like to write code for various things however the one combination that hasn’t appeared much has been writing my own games.  This is mainly due to the fact that I don’t have many ideas that are realistic for me to implement.

Enter Windy Garden, the first game I’ve written since my days on the TI-85.  The premise is simple; a bunch of seeds are floating around on the screen and your objective is to plant them by nudging them with a chain reaction of blooms created by tapping on the screen.  You need to have good timing and strategic placement though; as the blooms only last for a short period of time.

Inspired by a similar game on Facebook titled Chain Reaction, I felt the concepts in this game were simple enough to implement for my first foray into Objective-C and iPhone programming.

The screenshots below show my current progress on the app, using graphics that were all hand-made so they don’t look the best.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that in the end.

Currently the core part of the game has been implemented, but there are still a few tasks that remain including scoring, game over, etc.  And I have a couple tricks up my sleeve yet as well.  Look forward to future posts which will discuss how I went about writing the game and what I learned as I went along.

Earlier this week the ActiveReports team made a Release Candidate available in the run-up to the final release of ActiveReports 6!

This release brings us closer to the final release of ActiveReports 6, and its coming soon!

The ActiveReports team has just released the first public beta for ActiveReports 6!

This new version has many new features in it, with a healthy mix of design-time and run-time enhancements.

My favorite new features are the Flash viewer control, designer snap lines, and RepeatToFill option.

Flash Viewer

The Flash viewer control makes it easy to provide a great looking report viewer on your web page.  It replaces the ActiveX control due to the obvious limitations that technology presented users, not to mention the security implications with using ActiveX that kept many people from using it.

Designer Snap Lines

Snap lines make it a cinch to line up the controls in your report.  Now table style layouts are easier than ever to create and avoid the issues that overlapping controls can cause when exported to Excel.

Repeat to Fill

Have an Invoice style document that you need to generate, where the report contents fills an area on the page?  Repeat to Fill to the rescue!  This new property makes it possible to generate green-bar reports that fill the page, even if there isn’t enough data to do it.

Read what Sanjeev had to say about the ActiveReports 6 beta release.

This week has been pretty exciting at GrapeCity.  I started the week off by releasing Data Dynamics Analysis, the team is already working on some killer functionality  I can’t wait to talk about it in a few months or so.

Next up, ActiveReports for .NET is in the running for the asp.netPRO Reader’s Choice Awards for 2009.  Please take a moment to vote for us in the Printing and Reporting category.

GrapeCity and Data Dynamics have also won several awards from ComponentSource.

2008 Bestselling Products Awards

• ActiveReports for .NET—Ranked #2 in Top 5 Products
• ActiveReports COM/ActiveX—Ranked #26 in Top 50 Products
• Data Dynamics Reports—Ranked #100 in Top 100 Products
  • I’m especially proud of this, as I’ve been on the Data Dynamics Reports team since March 2006 as an Assistant Product Manager and then as Product Manager.  The product had already been in development for several years before I joined; but it’s still great to see something myself and the rest of the team have worked on sell so well.

2008 Bestselling Publisher Awards

• GrapeCity-Data Dynamics—Ranked #4 in Top 5 Publishers
• GrapeCity (Japan)—Ranked #5 in Top 5 Publishers

Lastly, Data Dynamics Analysis and Data Dynamics Reports are on sale for the rest of the month!

Save 33% on Data Dynamics Reports by using coupon code “903955CBD” and save 46% on Data Dynamics Analysis by using coupon code “AE0455CBD” at checkout!

Tonight I’ve released a new build of Data Dynamics Analysis to the world.  The team has been working hard on this release since the beginning of the year, and I’m glad that everyone can see what they’ve been up to since then.

The release notes for this build are below.

In high school, I used to be a voracious reader, going through books fairly frequently.  However, once I went to college and after I moved to my own apartment my reading dropped.  Lately, I’ve been wanting to get back to reading like I used to.  Not only for the enjoyment but because I felt like I was missing something.

Now that I actually have furniture in my apartment I also have a comfy place to read.  I almost bought a Kindle in October or November, but held off.  Would I really use it enough to justify spending $350?  Then in late January several of the people I follow on twitter kept mentioning the announcement/release of an updated Kindle.  I bit the bullet then, and placed my preorder for a Kindle hoping I would automatically get upgraded to the new one if it was announced.  Two days later it was publicly announced and I received an email confirming that I had been upgraded.

Fast forward to a week ago.  My Kindle arrived!  I was immediately impressed with the device.  You can probably find unboxing photos on various gadget sites.  The day before I purchased a few books and they synced to it shortly after I turned the device on.

Coming back to now, I’ve read three books on the Kindle; not counting the user’s guide or the thank you letter from Jeff Bezos.  Bad Astronomy by Dr. Phil Plait, Ur by Stephen King, and A Briefer History of Time by Dr. Stephen Hawking and Dr. Leonard Mlodinow.  If anyone loves to read, I would definately recommend getting one.

We have released a hotfix for Data Dynamics Reports.  This new build fixes the designer redraw issue that was present in the last build released.

The redraw issue was caused by a partial fix that was put in to correct an issue where borders disappeared on the chart.

Over 4 months in the making, and it shows; I just uploaded a new build of Data Dynamics Reports to the site.

This build introduces many new features and even more fixes for issues that users have reported.

In the next month or two we’ll be debuting an enhanced setup application, a new chart type, and more fixes.

Release notes follow the break:

New Features:

• 102299 – It is now possible to specify the default target for links on the web viewer control.
• 111430 – The Data Source smart panel now displays the connection properties page by default.
• 111432 – When typing an HTML color value, # will be prepended automatically if it is needed.
• 118089 – Textboxes can now be placed over existing report items using the mouse, previously this could only be done with the keyboard.
• 121022 – The Object Data Provider will now use a TypeConverter if one is supplied when pulling values from object properties.
• 121632 – The page border can now be disabled when using the windows forms viewer control.
• 122807 – It is now possible to create a blank report that is ready to be used with a Master Report via an API call.
• 124763 – A custom resource locator can now be specified on the User Designer Control allowing custom resources to be used at design time and within the preview tab of the designer.
• 35195 – Setting the default page orientation of a report is now more intuitive.

Fixed Issues:

• 107016 – Reports using a banded list and master reports in a certain configuration will no longer run forever.
• 109667 – The Chart, Bullet graph, and sparkline data regions and report item now contain data output options in their smart panels.
• 110195 – Using the “Select All” command in a content report no longer selects items outside of the content placeholders.
• 111125 – The Data Explorer should no longer be completely collapsed when loading a report from a stream.
• 112388 – The visual studio design time behavior of the user designer control has been improved.
• 113585 – The designer snap-to-grid now functions better when grid spacing is using metric units.
• 113716 – The crystal import utility no longer generates invalid matrices when importing reports. It also provides better error information when it cannot import items from the report.
• 114195 – Borders on matrix cells are properly exported to Excel.
• 116378 – Fixed a crash that could occur when creating a new data source.
• 117165 – Intellisense in the code tab now reflects the assemblies that are available to the report.
• 117348 – The vertical alignment property of the textbox now works at design time. Note: It will not be displayed while editing a textbox.
• 117656 – Improved designer performance in certain cases.
• 117659 – Rectangles on the body using the ToggleItem or Hidden property now collapse space when required.
• 117708 – Dragging report items between containers no longer places the control away from where the control was dropped.
• 119433 – The formatted text report item now uses the same font smoothing as the rest of the report engine when rendering to raster images.
• 119492 – Lists with a non-constant visibility now render properly.
• 120199 – Exports from the web viewer control will no longer be initially blocked by internet explorer.
• 120341 – The table and matrix controls now ignore the Top, Left, Width, and Height of the report item contained within their cells.
• 120699 – The Globals!PageNumber expression can now be used to control visibility of controls in the page header or footer of a report.
• 120704 – The grids for editing editing a data source, parameters, or sorting have been updated to make better use of the space available.
• 121032 – MultiValue parameters no longer repeat addition times for each parameter in the report.
• 121574 – Fixed an InvalidOperationException that would be intermittently thrown while modifying a report in the designer and reloading it.
• 121836 – The PlotArea of the chart control has been updated to include only the areas bounded by the axes.
• 122665 – Fixed an issue that can occur when using data set parameters in connection with multi value parameters when the name of a dataset parameter begins with an ‘@’ symbol.
• 122943 – A banded list that is nested within a table now resizes correctly.
• 123063 – The Barcode control can now be used in a page header or footer.
• 123083 – Deleting a table which contains a nested table no longer produces an exception.
• 123335 – Updated parameters in the web viewer and re-running the report now updates the report.
• 123353 – MultiValue parameters can now be nullable.
• 123590 – An empty report no longer throws an exception when exporting to an image.
• 123724 – Custom Report Items now collapse the space they occupied when using a conditional expression for visibility.
• 123774 – The textbox again responds to mouse clicks to position the caret.
• 123811 – Contextual validation is now performed on matrix and table groups.
• 123939 – When loading reports from a stream the current working directory is now used as the “base” directory.
• 125077 – An exception is no longer thrown when dragging a report item onto the separator between the page header and footer that says “Body”.
• 32885 – Data Dynamics Reports now runs under medium trust again.
• 33001 – The bullet graph now has additional font properties.
• 34099 – The textbox background color no longer overlaps the table border by 1pt.
• 39311 – Tables exported to Word no longer ignore cell borders.
• 43951 – The True/False radio buttons for boolean report parameters now behave appropriately.
• 46067 – The Calendar control now has better validation rules associated with it.
• 48788 – Syntax errors on the custom code tab, will now display the correct line number when a compile error occurs.
• 51922 – The Dock property of the web viewer control now works correctly.

I was saddened yesterday to learn that Tim Moffatt passed away after his battle with cancer.

I didn’t meet Tim until after I was hired at Data Dynamics.  He was busy dealing with taxes so was unable to sit in on my interview.  Which makes it all the more important to me, that he and the other owners of Data Dynamics were willing to take a chance on me; at the time I was working a dead-end IT job and had no real software development experience.

There is so much more to say, but the words don’t flow easily; so I’ll stop and repeat the words I started with today: Thanks, Tim.

Rest in peace

Keith May, Lucas, Raji, and Mike also posted their thoughts.

I just uploaded the latest version of Data Dynamics Analysis to the website!

This version has been in the making for quite a while now.  It introduces several important features.  First is that we’ve done away with the convoluted licensing process for the ASP.NET control!  DDA now makes use of the licensing facilities provided in ASP.NET and Visual Studio.

Second, we’ve introduced part-to-whole calculations.  With this feature you can see how each member relates to the whole picture, a particular row/column, or row/column group.  Perfect for when you’re interested in seeing how the data changes within the table, row/column, or group but don’t really care what the actual values are.

I don’t have the feature pages updated yet because I didn’t want to hold back this release any longer; I’ll get them updated sometime this weekend though.