GrapeCity Forums

Scott Willeke and myself are on Microsoft campus in Redmond right now for the VS Live show. I need to say that I am impressed by this show content so far. I have been attending Vbits and VS Live shows since early 1996 and since the Orlando show in October of 2001, in my opinion, the conferences have not been well attended and the exhibit hall had always been a ghost town. This year, 1105 Media has done a great job bring great content and sponsors and qualified attendees back to the conference.

I was a little worried by the short show hours for exhibitors, but being in the hallway right by the session rooms has made the attendees desire to visit the booths great. Since we have a higher percentage of developers and decision makers at this show, the contacts made have been well worth the time of GrapeCity to start sponsoring again.

We have had some great discussions on the Active Reports and Spread products and have given many demos. We have had a great time meeting with the attendees and sharing the news about who GrapeCity is and reassuring them that the Active Reports and Spread products are still the same core products we have had for many years; just now under a larger umbrella to enable us to push the capabilities of these products even more.

If you are attending the VS Live 2010 show, stop by the “purple” table and chat about the products with Scott and myself. Also, pick up a free t-shirt and enter for a drawing for a Flip HD camcorder. Have a great day.

Scott Shorter
GrapeCity

Yesterday, we had two enquiries about customers web application that was using ClientAutoCalculation was no longer working (just stopped). When I tested this on my Vista computer, I saw the same behavior. So, when I got to my work computer (Windows XP), I tested this again and had no problems. So I started debugging the issue on my Vista computer and found the problem in our fpspread.htc file (this is the JavaScript that gets attached to the Spread object client side). The problem was on this line of code.

        if (window.external) req = window.external.XMLHttpRequest;

The problem was XMLHttpRequest was not a property of window.external and was throwing an exception and so our AJAX callback was not working. This all came due to a Windows Update earlier this week on my Vista computer. My first thought was this was going to break customers web applications who are using version 2.5 and higher of Spread for ASP.NET, but the development team said this line of code was added only to version 4 for use with our Spread for SharePoint product.

SO... We have fixed the line of code and have posted the new htc file on our ftp server.

ftp://ftp.fpoint.com/SpreadASPNET4/fpspreadhtc.zip

AND... We should be updating the latest maintenance release setups with the new client script file shortly.

If you are using Spread for ASP.NET 4 and have users browsing to it on IE7 in Vista, then you will need to get this latest script file and replace it in your web application.

Today marks my 14th anniversary with FarPoint Technologies. For someone who knew relatively nothing about developing computer software, FarPoint gave me a chance to learn and share with others their terrific Spread products. And I thank them for this opportunity.

I was working for a Midwest computer company providing hardware support (and customer service) when the phone rang that September 1994 day. I answered the phone which had the very irate President of FarPoint on the other end. I was use to these kind of calls because of the lack of good QA at the company I was at. I quickly and efficiently (IMHO) calmed the customer and told him how I will make sure the situation would be rectified. (I decided to do what a Floor Manager would have done because they were busy and I knew it was the right thing to do). The customer (President of FarPoint) quieted down quickly and then said "Anybody who can listen to me the way you just did and give me the support you just did I want working for me". That is when I saw the 919 area code and said
I am from North Carolina and would love to move back". He said whenever you want to come back to NC, you will have a job". I was down in just a couple of months and been on this exciting ride ever since.

One of the great benefits of working for FarPoint is the family atmosphere and how everyone works as a team to better everyone. I quickly learned the FarPoint product and the development environment that most customers I would be working with would be using thanks to this fact. I am now the moderator on our forums, answering support/sales/presales phone calls, exhibiting at trade shows, and speaking about our product as much as possible. I get to meet many people and share what FarPoint is doing and how we can help them succeed in their development.

I am looking forward to many more years working with everyone and hope to take this one step further to evangelize our customers to want to share their FarPoint experience with others. We have many things we are working on this year at FarPoint and can't wait to share them with you. Happy New Year everyone.

Scott Shorter
Technical Evangelist

A few months ago at the Triangle .NET Users Group meeting, Brad Abrams of Microsoft presented some new features releasing with the 3.5 .NET framework SP1. One that caught my eye was Dynamic Data. Brad was able to create a complete CRUD web application in just a few minutes with no writing of code. When I saw this, I was thinking how great it would be if we at FarPoint could configure our Spread control to work with this new technology. I passed this along to the product manager and development team for Spread for ASP.NET and they worked on researching what was needed in our product to enable this functionality.

After a few weeks, we had something they were ready to show me, and it looked great. I have now created a video showing how to replace the standard GridView control with our Spread control in a Dynamic Data website. Take a look and tell us what you think. If you have any comments or questions about this, feel free to email me.

Scott Shorter

I was working with a customer the other day who had problems printing from the Spread for Windows Forms product. He stated it was crashing his computer (blue screen). I have not heard of any blue screens since working with Windows 98, so this took me aback. I did not see anything special in his print code or the code to format the Spread control, so I asked him for the printer driver he was printing to, so I could try to reproduce the problem. He told me it was the HP LaserJet 4250 PCL 6 driver, so I downloaded this from HP website and tried printing to my printer using this driver and sure enough blue screen.

When the computer rebooted, I got the "There has been an error ..." message, so I decided to go ahead and report this ( a lot of the times, I do not report the errors). During the reporting process, it checked for solutions and there happened to be a solution. I checked out the following KBase article and read what looked to be exactly what was my issue. I was printing from GDI+ to one of the printers on the list.

When working with the customer, it printed to another printer he had correctly and it printed to the 4250 correctly when printing from Excel or Word. So, this KBASE article looked to fit the bill for my fix.

I downloaded the hotfix and retested the printout and it worked. I notified the customer and now he is able to redistribute the application using our Spread for Windows Forms without worrying about the printing issue.

Scott Shorter

The FarPoint crew has arrived in Las Vegas last evening and decided to walk the strip playing some slot machines and enjoying the sights. The time everyone went to bed differed, but we all convenyed at noon today to set up our booth for exhibiting.

A conference would not be a conference (for us at least) without some problems. We worked through everything and had it set up and ready to go for the reception this evening. From 5-7:30 tonight, the exhibit hall was open and there were a great number of people interested in hearing the new Microsoft technologies.

At our booth, we were talking with exisiting customers and meeting potential new customers. We had a lot of people come by to hear about the new things at FarPoint Technologies. Most people came by to hear about our Spread for Web Forms product for use in ASP.NET or in a WebPart for use in SharePoint. We also had quite a bit of interest in the BizTalk Pipeline Disassembler product.

After the show tonight, we had reservations at a great Chinese restaraunt, China Grill. Then, we headed for some dancing with friends at Coyote Ugly. The rest of the gang stayed out, but I have work to do, so I am sigining off. Tomorrow, I should have pictures from the show.