The Actipro Blog

We’re very close now to having a Silverlight Studio closed beta test ready to go, probably in the next several days!

Here’s a screenshot taken yesterday:

Some things to note… Silverlight Studio comes with complete menu/menuitem/contextmenu set of controls, a toolbar control, and custom styles for buttons.  Not only that but they come in the default Aero theme, along with the 3 Office 2010 themes.  We even have a ThemeManager that lets you switch these themes dynamically at run-time.

Closed beta test

We’re currently working on the deployment scripts and finishing up some final items before the first closed beta test is ready.  We expect this to be ready in the next several days.

This first beta will be a closed beta test, meaning that you will have to sign up to participate.  Note that documentation topics will likely not be available in this first beta test, however there will be a complete set of samples and much of the WPF Studio documentation on similar products applies to Silverlight Studio products.

While the closed beta test is going on, we will be finalizing things such as documentation, designer functionality, etc., in preparation for a public beta release.

Signing up for the closed beta test

If you are interested in participating in the closed beta test, please email our sales address with:

• Your name and e-mail address
• Company
• Which other Actipro products you own
• What interests you most about Silverlight Studio
• What you plan to do with Silverlight Studio products
• Which other products you’d like to see implemented in Silverlight (in priority order)

Please only sign up if you are willing to use the products immediately and provide constructive feedback.

Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you!

We have been working very hard on finishing up our upcoming Actipro Silverlight Studio suite over the past several months.  I wanted to share a screenshot of where it’s at and give some status updates.

SyntaxEditor for Silverlight

The biggest part of Silverlight Studio is SyntaxEditor for Silverlight.   It is a port of our popular SyntaxEditor for WPF control, which is an extremely powerful and customizable code editing control similar to the VS 2010 code editor.

Once this control is out, you will have the ability to create online IDEs, since you’ll have a syntax-highlighting editor control that will work in any browser that supports Silverlight and has advanced features like code outlining, custom adornments (squiggles, inline images, etc.), parsing, and much more. 

I just opened a 2MB C# file from my hard drive and it opened immediately, ready for editing, and with full syntax highlighting active.

SyntaxEditor for Silverlight is very near code complete for its first release now.  We tackled the biggest open remaining issues this week.  There are just a few minor things left to do.

As you can see from the screenshot, the very first version will ship with over 40 individual samples for SyntaxEditor alone.

Views for Silverlight

Silverlight Studio will also ship with Views for Silverlight, which is a port of our Views for WPF product.  Views includes a number of panels that make it easy to create fluid animations of child elements, along with a new ZapPanel control, and some more new panels on the way soon.

Views for Silverlight is all ready to go for the Silverlight Studio launch.

Shared Library

Our Silverlight Shared Library has some helpful controls built into it such as a fully working Menu, MenuItem, and ContextMenu setup.  It also has a port of our transition controls that are found in WPF Studio.  We’ll talk more about these and more soon.

What’s left to do?

We are currently working on a last couple minor features for SyntaxEditor.  Then we need to finish some of the intro documents and feature lists for the products.  Once we have our deployment code written, we will post a live demo of Silverlight Studio on our site so that you can try it out.

We will likely then open up closed beta testing to customers who contact us.  During that testing period we’ll be working on documentation, web site pages, and doing some other finishing touches.

Summary

We’re really excited about this upcoming products, and based on our customer feedback, you are too.  It won’t be long now before we can post something on our site for you to try.  Keep an eye on our blog as we’ll post here as more information becomes available.

Today we’ve updated our Actipro Contrib project on Codeplex with the full source of the ActiproSoftware.Editors.Interop.DataGrid.Wpf351.dll assembly. 

This assembly has a number of helper classes that make it easy to integrate the editor controls in the Actipro Editors for WPF product with the Microsoft Datagrid found in the WPF Toolkit and in .NET 4.0.

Since our pre-built assemblies target .NET 3.5 SP1, we reference the DataGrid in the WPF Toolkit and not the one in .NET 4.0.  Now that this project has been made open source, you can download it and change it to use the .NET 4.0 DataGrid instead if you are using that version of the DataGrid.

You can get all the source code here:

http://actipro.codeplex.com/

Happy coding!

We’ve just released a new build of WPF Studio 2010.1 that has these major updates:

• Evaluation period extended to 30 days
• Added new CountryComboBox and CurrencyComboBox controls to Editors for WPF, and two new QuickStarts.
• Added styles for native ComboBox and TextBox controls to Editors for WPF, and a new QuickStart.
• Added sample language projects/definitions for the C, C++, and RTF languages to SyntaxEditor for WPF.
• Improved the SyntaxEditor for WPF completion list item measuring speed by about 400%.
• Made numerous minor tweaks and bug fixes throughout the WPF products.

Let’s walk through some of the new controls and features… More...

Last week we published our brand-new design for our WPF reference guide site called WPFpedia.  Today I’d like to do an introduction on how to use the home page of the resource guide to examine resources.

This screen shows the main home page of WPFpedia.  There is a Resource List on the left and a quick Search sidebar on the right.  Let’s examine what you can do with each one.

The Resource List

The Resource List is a quick list that defaults to showing the most recent resource items.

Each item shows:

• Number of votes
• Post date
• Number of views
• Special adornments such as admin favorites
• Title
• Summary description
• Source hostname
• Number of comments
• Tags

Voting

Under the vote count indicator, a plus button allows logged-in users to vote for the resource item.  This tells other users that you think the resource item is helpful and also allows you to easily find it again from your profile page.

Viewing a resource

To view a resource, click on the resource’s title.

Searching by tag

Any of the tags can be clicked to automatically search the resource guide by that tag.  This same concept applies anywhere tags are listed on the site.

Sorting the list

The Resource List can be sorted mutiple ways:

• Newest – The newest moderated resources appear first
• Most-viewed – The resources with the highest view counts appear first
• Most-votes – The resources with the most votes appear first
• Upcoming – New resources that have been submitted by users but have not yet been approved appear here
• Random – Resources are listed completely randomly, which is a great way to discover some interesting resources you wouldn’t normally look for

The Search pane

While the Resource List allows you to page through resources using one of the sorting methods, sometimes you may be looking for specific information.  After all, this is a resource guide where searching is its main function! :)

The Search pane, located on the right side of the home page, allows for complete searching of the resource guide.

Searching using a query

You can type text in the query box marked Enter search text and press the Search button to find the results the most closely match your query.

Searching by tag

As mentioned above, you can click any tag to automatically search the resource guide by that tag.  All resource items that are tagged with the search tag will be returned in a list.

The tags listed in the Search pane use varying font sizes.  The larger the font, the more resource items are in the guide that use that tag.

Summary

I hope this summary gives you the information needed to start using the guide effectively.  In follow-up blog posts well examine some other pieces of the site.

Jump over to WPFpedia now to start using it.

We’re very happy to announce that our WPFpedia.com site redesign has just been published and is now live!  Here’s a screenshot:

Take it for a spin now at:  www.wpfpedia.com

What is WPFpedia?

WPFpedia is a free reference guide we created for WPF developers.  There are a ton of useful resources on WPF development out on the web but finding them can be tricky.  Our reference guide site provides a one-stop shop way to access WPF development resources.

However it’s not just another link site.  All our content is completely moderated meaning we only list resource items that would truly be helpful to developers.  We tag all items and you can easily search by tag if you wish, or even filter search results by multiple tags.  We provide summaries of each resource item and even provide summaries of the source web sites.

Once you create a free account, you can vote on resource items you like and can add comments to them as well.  You can suggest your own resource items too.

We have backend logic that watches the web for interesting blog posts that could be useful to WPF developers.  Once found, we can read each one and determine whether it should be added to the resource guide or not.

About the design

We’ve tried our best to create a design that isn’t cluttered and really allows you to focus on the content of each page.  There is a minimal amount of advertising as well, currently one banner ad on each page.  We did this so as not to distract you from the content you are trying to find since this is first and foremost, our contribution back to the community.

Use case example

Say I’m a WPF developer (which I am :) ) and I have been directed by my manager to use MVVM in our new WPF application.  I can log onto wpfpedia.com and click the MVVM tag link on the search page.  This will provide me with a list of all the MVVM-related blog posts that have been loaded into the guide.  I can examine the details of each resource item and if it looks interesting to me, jump directly to it.

The old WPFpedia site

Our first iteration of WPFpedia was hosted inline with our main Actipro web site under the support section.  With this new redesign we wanted to move it out into its own site that is completely focused on delivering resource content to its viewers.

More information

I invite you to check the site out, sign up for a free account, and start voting and commenting on resource items you like.  Please use the Contact form on the site if you have any suggestions for further improvement as well.

Over the coming days, I’ll expand on some more capabilities of the site. 

Then following that I’ll start posting some screenshots of the work we’re doing on our upcoming Silverlight controls as we prepare Silverlight Studio.