List of major changes after the break…

Changes

• Added a description property to connection available as a tooltip
• Changed default value of “Hide when minimized” option
• Ensured only one instance could be run at the same time
• Implemented explicit save
• Refreshed application icon (more Vista/7 compliant)
• Avoided crashing if no connection is available
• Upgraded sharpupdater to latest version
• Fixed new connection adding bugs
• Started developing send connection as attachment function
• Made TextInputDialog not resizable

Also we had an O.S. upgrade forcing me to use Windows 7, so I took the chance to refresh the application icon to better fit the new interface. 

As always, if you use and like this product, feel free to comment with suggestions, bugfixes or change request, so I can make SharpRD better fit your needs.

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• sharprd 0.0.4 (33)

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

Download

• sharpallegro-0.0.4-src.zip (309)
• sharpallegro-0.0.4-bin.zip (252)

Feedback is very appreciated, so feel free to comment with bug reports or feature requests

The core emulator code is heavily based (for the moment) on the sharpnes project, yep they also stole my favourite prefix (Copyright infos included in the package)

Download

• mulator 0.0.1 (60)

Happy playing, and as always feel free to comment about everything

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.

Download

sharprd 0.0.3 (31)

Hope this one will make you happier, but feel free to comment with further feature requests.

Best regards

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

Google Chart Image APIs

https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?&cht=lc&chs=700x350&chtt=Downloads&chd=t:2,7,11,26,5,14,16,8,17,23,19,9,23,11,22,12,13,12,8,22,10,15,11,24,9,5,25,17,6,10,9&chds=a&chl=Jul 11|Jul 18|Jul 25|Aug 1&chco=3D7930&chm=B,C5D4B5BB,0,0,0|o,3D7930,0,-1,6.0&chg=23.333333333333,50,0,0,16.666666666667,0&chxt=x,y&chxp=0,5,12,19,26&chls=3&chxr=0,0,30|1,0,26

Google Chart Tools

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
	google.load("visualization", "1", {packages:["corechart"]});
	google.setOnLoadCallback(drawChart);
	function drawChart() {
		var data = new google.visualization.DataTable();
		data.addColumn('string', 'Day');
		data.addColumn('number', 'Downloads');
		data.addRows([
			["Jul 6",2 ],["Jul 7",7 ],["Jul 8",11 ],["Jul 9",26 ],["Jul 10",5 ],["Jul 11",14 ],["Jul 12",16 ],["Jul 13",8 ],["Jul 14",17 ],["Jul 15",23 ],["Jul 16",19 ],["Jul 17",9 ],["Jul 18",23 ],["Jul 19",11 ],["Jul 20",22 ],["Jul 21",12 ],["Jul 22",13 ],["Jul 23",12 ],["Jul 24",8 ],["Jul 25",22 ],["Jul 26",10 ],["Jul 27",15 ],["Jul 28",11 ],["Jul 29",24 ],["Jul 30",9 ],["Jul 31",5 ],["Aug 1",25 ],["Aug 2",17 ],["Aug 3",6 ],["Aug 4",10 ],["Aug 5",9 ]		]);
 
		var chart = new google.visualization.AreaChart(document.getElementById('chart_div'));
		chart.draw(data, {
			width: 700,
			height: 350,
			title: 'Downloads',
			legend: 'none'
		});
	}
</script>

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

Click on the images to download them or get the whole package with inkscape/gimp files here: tbbt shirts (42)

Feel free to comment with your opinions about the shirts, request for more or just talk about our favourite TV show

Bazinga!!!

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…

Feel free to comment with feedbacks, feature requests or anything else you like

One of the main improvements is that sharphook is no longer only a keyboard hook, it now support mouse events. Feel free to integrate mouse clicks, wheel movements and more in your application.

Download

• sharphook 0.0.3 (44)

Here follows the list of major changes, for a complete list take a look at the CHANGES file inside the release package.

• Replaced background with random star field
• Implemented middle mouse button to uncover surrounding area
• Added startup version control check
• Code cleanup
• Implemented difficulty level selection and moved rendering away from WinForms
• Updated sharpallegro to latest version

Download

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”.

Nothing to worry about if you know who’s keeping a reference to this entity…obviously that’s not our case.

Since we needed to start practicing with CRM web services, we decided to develop a small tool to recursively enumerate all the references to our “to be deleted” entity, and eventually delete them.

This tool serves also as a good example of how to handle CRM web services, enumerate entities and their metadata, CRUD operations on entities, …

In the following download link you’ll find sources and binaries.

Note: before running the tool you need to configure the connection to your CRM organization editing the app.config file. The operation should be straight forward.

Feel free to provide feedback commenting this article.

Regards