Why player penetration isn’t as important as you might think
by Neil Middleton 12:05 pm Wednesday, 12 November 2008.

Something we come across a lot when we’re talking about Rich Internet Applications is the questions regarding player penetration, i.e how many people have player X installed (Adobe’s Flash vs. Microsoft’s Silverlight), as it’s generally seen as the primary measure for how easy to “see” an application will be.

However, something we’re also seeing is that the players are currently suited to different areas, Flash being very good for the public sites (video being No 1) and Silverlight being very good for Intranet based applications where Microsoft technology is used as the back end.

So, with player penetration it’s worth considering the following:  Is the player penetration at all important when you are looking at an intranet application with a closed user audience?  Do you need to worry about the percentage of the internet that has your runtime installed if you can go round and install it on all your users machines for them anyway?

Not really.

This raises another interesting thing, which is that of internal approval.  We are now finding that for those environments where neither Flash (in a new enough version) or Silverlight are present, companies are generally more willing to take on Silverlight due to the vendor - it’s a product that comes from a company they already have a relationship with, and also one that can be pushed out via Windows Update and the like.  It’s a sys-admins dream come true.

So, at the end of the day it seems that Flash vs Silverlight is definitely a case of best tool for the job.  If you are building a public facing site of some kind, use the Flash platform.  However, if you’re in a closed environment and MS are already in place - go with Silverlight / WPF.  These choices will just make your life easier.

PS:  Incidentally, we still come across lots of businesses who haven’t broken free of IE6, a seven year old browser yet (!) due to some internal policy - this goes to show how hard it can sometimes be bringing in a third party plugin to help with RIA’s.

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First CF Doc’s podcast now live!
by Niklas Richardson 5:53 pm Monday, 10 November 2008.

The first episode of the UKCFUG’s CF Doc podcast is now live!

Monochrome’s Niklas Richardson and Neil Middleton, along with CFEclipse fame Mark Drew kicked off the first episode of the CF Doc podcast in front of a live audience at last week’s November UKCFUG meeting.

You can read more about the first episode on the UKCFUG website.

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PrintQueue - PDF printing with Acrobat Reader end to end solution
by Radek Gruchalski 4:59 pm .

Last week I posted twice on printing PDF documents. This is the last post of this unplanned series. Today I would like to present an end to end solution including ColdFusion PrintQueue event gateway with two C# applications for controlling Acrobat Reader. Quick summary of the problem we faced last week: ColdFusion cfprint tag has problems when printing documents created with LiveCycle Designer. Not all items from documents, specially repeated regions are printed. At Monochrome we had to figure out how to print them. Simplest solutions are best and we decided to go with Acrobat Reader batch printing capabilities.
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Updating your hosts file in Vista 64-bit
by Neil Middleton 11:37 am Monday, 3 November 2008.

I came across an interesting issue this morning whereby my hosts file had simply vanished.  For the unitiated amongst you, this file presents a kind of local DNS for Windows TCP/IP which essentially means you can make up a domain and point it at an IP address and have that apply to your machine only.

Now, normally this file is located in %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc where %systemroot% is C:\Windows.  However, on 64-bit, System32 is replaced by SysWOW64.  Not such a big issue, except when you go looking for your hosts file from inside a 32-bit application such as Flex Builder / Eclipse.

For some reason, in Vista 64-bit, 32-bit applications can’t see the 64-bit tree, meaning that the hosts file is essentially invisible.  So, how the hell do we get round this?

Well, backdoor ahoy - there is a solution.  In your C:\Windows folder (%systemroot%) create a “sysnative” folder and browse through that.  Bingo! your good old 32-bit folder structure should now be present, and low and behold your hosts file.

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Playing with DeepZoom
by Neil Middleton 3:34 pm Friday, 24 October 2008.

One of the more interesting parts of the Silverlight 2 release is the DeepZoom capability as demonstrated a while back by the Hard Rock Cafe.  After the Silverlight 2 final came out last week I decided I would sit down and play with the DeepZoom composer, an application provided by Microsoft for composing DeepZoom imagery.

This initial demonstration that I have done isn’t anything crazy-complicated, but merely a simple composition of flat images at a variety of resolutions and sizes.  To give you an idea of the zoom capabilities of the product take a good look at Niklas’s eyes, or zoom down into the map.

This image contains all the Monochrome website content as of today.



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