We've been working some long hours to get WPF Studio v4.0 completed and into your hands.  Both the Docking & MDI and Gauge products are now just about code complete for their first release.  We already have a lot of samples that demonstrate major areas of functionality.  We are now working on documentation and designer support.

As mentioned before, WPF Studio v4.0 includes a complete set of circular, linear, and digital gauges, all of which are native WPF controls.

I wanted to highlight some of the capabilities of our gauges so we came up with an automotive gauges gallery that shows a collage of gauge controls related to a car dashboard.

All of the controls above are vector drawn (meaning they scale cleanly to any size) and can be data bound to live data. 

Dampening, or the process of smoothing out transitions to new values, is fully supported too.  When enabled, as values change, the gauge needles smoothly animate to the new values like a real gauge would.

The full source for these control samples are in our v4.0 Sample Browser.  Stay tuned for some more sample screenshots soon.

We've had a lot of interest from customers regarding our product roadmap for WPF development.  I wanted to post where things currently stand and where our future development priorities lay.  I also would like to give customers the opportunity to voice their opinion as to what they would most like to see added to WPF Studio down the road.

In addition, we are now announcing a new WPF product that will be available after the WPF Studio v4.0 release:  PropertyGrid for WPF.

WPF Product Roadmap

Here is the roadmap for WPF development as of June 2008.

WPF Studio v4.0 Release

The WPF Studio v4.0 release will be available in the next several weeks.  We are still finishing up the two new products that have been added and are in the process of adding samples, documentation, etc. 

Actipro Docking & MDI for WPF

The Docking product implements docking tool windows and MDI functionality for WPF.  We haven't talked too much about the feature set yet, however we'll get into that closer to release time.  Rest assured though that themes are created for all Windows system themes, along with all three Office themes.  It also will offer a huge number of options.

Use the docking tag to search for info on this product in the Actipro blog.

Actipro Gauge for WPF

The Gauge product makes it easy to create any sort of circular, linear, or digital gauge.  These gauges can be used to represent data in digital dashboards, provide virtual instrumentation, and much more.

Use the gauge tag to search for info on this product in the Actipro blog.

After WPF Studio v4.0

The following two products have had work started on them but were placed on hold temporarily while we divert our development resources towards getting WPF Studio v4.0 out the door.

PropertyGrid for WPF

A new product, PropertyGrid for WPF, will provide property grid functionality similar to that found in Visual Studio and Expression Blend.  We will get into more details about the product following the WPF Studio v4.0 release.  However its development is already fairly far along, and we expect it to be ready within a few weeks after the WPF Studio v4.0 release.

SyntaxEditor for WPF

SyntaxEditor for WPF will provide the high quality code editing experience you expect from Actipro, the industry leader in syntax highlighting editing controls and components.  One SyntaxEditor for WPF design goal is to make a common document/parsing library so that it can be shared with the next Windows Forms SyntaxEditor v5.0 and CodeHighlighter.  We also have a ton of new features planned that we will start posting about in the future.

As a WPF Studio Customer, Will I Receive These Products for Free?

As long as your WPF Studio subscription is active when a product is released, you will be eligible to upgrade to the new version and get any new products added to WPF Studio for free.  Each WPF Studio developer license includes a free subscription that can be renewed at its expiration date each year.

What Would You Like to See Added?

Let's hear your comments on what you'd like to see added that hasn't been listed in our roadmap above.

Some suggestions from customers have included:

• Grid
• Chart/graph
• Scheduling
• Reporting

Please post a comment and rank in order of priority which of these (or your own suggestions) that you would like us to work on.

At Actipro, the opinions of our customers matter and your feedback really will help steer our long term future development efforts.

Here is a new screenshot of a demo showing a RibbonWindow that contains a Ribbon along with docking tool windows and tabbed MDI, all in the Office 2007 black theme.

As mentioned in earlier blog posts, Docking for WPF will be part of the WPF Studio v4.0 release, due in several weeks.  Any customer who has an active WPF Studio subscription (all license purchases include free subscriptions) at the time of release will get this new product for free.

At Actipro we are always striving to improve IDE and designer support for our WPF control products. 

Now that Visual Studio 2008 has been out for some time with formal WPF support, we wanted to poll our user community to see if anyone is still using Visual Studio 2005 for development, or if everyone has basically moved onto Visual Studio 2008 for their development needs.

Our WPF control products currently install a sample project for VS 2005, however if nobody is using that version any more, we would like to migrate completely to Visual Studio 2008 projects only.

If you are a WPF application developer, please help guide our future WPF IDE support by answering a quick poll here:

Poll:  What IDEs do you use for WPF design/development?

It will only take a minute of your time... we appreciate the feedback!