sharpallegro 0.0.4 released!

I’m very pleased to announce a new release of sharpallegro.

Not much has changed, but there are some important improvements I wanted to make available to the public. Here follow a list of major changes (for a complete reference check the CHANGES file in the release package):

  • Updated allegro to 4.4.2
  • Forced x86 platform compilation on all projects to support 64 bit platforms
  • Ported RLE_SPRITE and COMPILED_SPRITE structs. (Actually COMPILED_SPRITE behaves as an RLE_SPRITE as if I386 was not defined)
  • Moved SVN repository away from Google Code

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sharprd 0.0.3 released!

Since  I had some feedback from sharprd users, I decided to release a new version, which doesn’t feature many updates, but some of them are critical for the usability.

Major changes include:

  • updates detection
  • option to enable tray icon minimization
  • import/export of connections set
  • isolated storage for saving connections
  • UI improvements
  • bugfixes

There’s also an attempt to enable remote program execution, but the lack of documentation about it, only resulted in preparing the required user interface.

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Google Chart Tools vs. Google Chart Image APIs

In another attempt of increasing my website page ranking and SEO, trying to understand the trends of my followers, I decided to improve my download statistics page.

The old one used to be a custom page where I needed to develop some easy charting tool (PHP lines graph tool).

Time passed and I decided to try a new approach, and one of the best examples I could find around was Google Analytics. Unfortunately the flash based chart inside analytics seems to remain a secret, but Google offers not one, but two free services to create your own charts (In my case line/area charts).

The first one I found was Google Chart Image APIs which works very similar to the php script I developed, of course it is a lot better and supports a gazilion of features.

I was quite satisfied, but suddenly, while looking for some more documentation, I stepped on Google Chart Tools. Actually that’s even more interesting.

Just to say some of the cool features it adds:

  • No width limit
  • Javascript based, allowing for async calls 
  • Automatic data mapping, take a look at the tooltip in the screenshot

Continue reading to uncover image and source examples of the two approaches compared

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Bazinga!!! Formerly: time to be nerd

Ok, by this time, the title should have attracted your attention :)

I’m a real fan of “The Big Bang Theory” TV show (I strongly suggest you start watching it if you didn’t yet), and I fell in love with Sheldon’s and Leonard’s shirts.

I wanted to buy a couple of them and I was sure to find some good examples around the web, but none of them seemed to satisfy my need to be nerd because of the price, USA shipping only and so on…

So (as a bit more often do), I decided to draw the logos myself and let them be printed by a local shop.

I opened up Inkscape and GIMP and here’s an example of what I got:

 

You can taste more after the break

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sharphook 0.0.4 released!

Just after a few days here’s another release of sharphook.

As always happens I had some requirements from another application I’m working on so I needed to improve sharphook as well.

Actually it’s not a real improvement, but a bugfix release since I found out Modifiers keys were not treated the way a normal WinForm application would do.

In the process I also fixed KeyPress combinations which were excluded because of system keys.

Download link after the break…

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The record could not be deleted because of an association

Dear Dynamics 2011 developers, here is my first article about Microsoft CRM development. I hope to write more while I follow the development of a new CRM project.

Since I’m a beginner in this field, the first articles will be about problems I’m facing in setting up and configuring Dynamics.

So here it comes, after trying to write calendar rules of an equipment, failing miserably, it happened we were not able to view the service calendar and other service related entities including the equipment owner of the corrupted calendar. Since we’re in early development we decided to delete the equipment and recreate it, but surprise surprise, our friend CRM won’t allow it.

So we faced the creepy message: “The record could not be deleted because of an association”.

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