The Actipro Blog

As mentioned in our previous blog post, we’ve been hard at work on some very major new features for the WPF SyntaxEditor control, the premier code editor control for Windows Presentation Foundation.  The three areas we’re about code complete with are:

• Collapsed text
• Intra-text spacers and intra-text adornment managers
• Code outlining

Note that the code in the current build 513 has portions of the above already implemented but the next build 514 is where we hope to have the object model about finalized.  We hope to have some samples and documentation for that build too.

Today I wanted to provide a sneak peek for a full source QuickStart that will be included in the next build 514 of WPF Studio.  This is a really neat QuickStart so prepare for a bunch of screenshots!

Code Reviewing QuickStart in action

This QuickStart is intended to show one way you could do code reviews within an app.  SyntaxEditor is the code editor control in use here.  Assume we have some code loaded from another developer and need to review it.  As we review, we’ll mark some sections of code to come back to later.

In the screenshot above, I as the reviewer determined that the namespace was incorrect.  So I selected the namespace name in the code editor, typed “The namespace is incorrect” in the textbox at the very top and clicked the Add note button.  Poof!  A note appeared in-line with the text.  Notice that the range I selected is now rendered with a yellow background.  But the really cool thing is that there’s also a note icon with drop-down arrow inside the text, between characters.  Is that a real control?  More...

We’ve just made the WPF Studio 2009.2 build 512 maintenance release available.  This maintenance release focuses on various bug fixes, but we’ve also made some significant updates to SyntaxEditor for WPF, mostly under the hood.

SyntaxEditor for WPF work-in-progress features

SyntaxEditor should now perform much better when using custom classification taggers. 

We also have started laying the framework pieces needed to support code outlining (folding).  The three main components of this are collapsed text, intra-text spacing/adornments, and an outlining manager.  Note that these components are work-in-progress, may still change, and currently are undocumented.

Collapsed text refers to the ability to “hide” a region of text so that the caret skips right over it.

Intra-text spacing means being able to insert custom-sized spacers in between certain text characters.  Then you can render custom adornments in those spaces.  This feature allows you to insert images or other content (even controls) right in the document.

Let’s take a look at a sample we’re developing to be released once these features are all complete:

Here we use one tag to collapse a region of text, another tag to reserve some space in its place, and an adornment manager to render the “…” box in that space.

The third component to code outlining is an outlining manager, which is what we’re working on right now.  The outlining manager will help drive the other features to provide a result like above.

The neat thing about our design is that you can use collapsed regions and intra-text spacing/adornment features independent of outlining.  This opens up some interesting possibilities.

Look for blog posts in the future discussing these features in more detail once we make some more progress on the outlining manager.  And again, please note that they are currently undocumented.  We’ll document them and provide samples once they have been finalized.

We’ve just published a WPF Studio 2009.2 maintenance release that contains some updates and fixes for all known issues since the first WPF Studio 2009.2 release.  Existing customers can download the update from their Organization Purchases page.

Details on the update are available in the announcement forum post.

What we accomplished

In Quarter 4 of 2009 we mostly focused on getting the WPF Studio 2009.2 release out. 

SyntaxEditor for WPF saw major updates to the Language Designer application, along with a ton of new features including tagging, adornments, squiggle lines, and much more.

Some screens and video showing the future SyntaxEditor for Silverlight control were made available.  This control shares most of the same framework as the WPF version of SyntaxEditor.

Docking/MDI for WPF added floating document support similar to the functionality found in Visual Studio 2010.  All floating windows can now be maximized and custom chromes can be used for rendering the window border/titlebars.

Editors for WPF added a new AnalogClock controls, and used this new clock on the DateTimeEditBox dropdown when appropriate.  A new editbox and a list control were added to support easy end user editing of enumeration values.

Navigation for WPF added a new ZoomContentControl that provides an intuitive interface for scrolling/zooming any large content, such as maps, pictures, reports, etc.

Ribbon for WPF added support for multi-row in-ribbon galleries.

All WPF controls received VS 2010 and Blend 3 designer support.

The SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on for WinForms added C# 4.0 and VB 10.0 parsing support.

What’s coming next

In the coming months, we plan on expanding our product line, getting more into the Silverlight realm, and updating Ribbon to use newer Office 2010 features.

Newsletters

The December 2009 newsletter gave an overview of the WPF Studio 2009.2 release along with other recent updates and future plans.

Blog post list

Here is a quick categorized list of blog postings made in this quarter.  More...