The Actipro Blog

We’re pleased to announce the release of the major new 2010.2 version of Silverlight Studio.  Here’s a quick summary of the enhancements.

Download Silverlight Studio 2010.2 now

or try a live demo in your browser if you have Silverlight 4 installed.

SyntaxEditor

SyntaxEditor, our code editing control for Silverlight, has received some huge enhancements in the new version.

LL(*) Parser Framework

We’ve ported the new LL(*) Parser Framework (recently added to the WPF SyntaxEditor) to the Silverlight SyntaxEditor in its entirety.  It is a unique custom parser-building framework with SyntaxEditor that features grammars written in C#/VB using EBNF-like notation, customizable AST construction, advanced error handling/reporting, easy code injection, a complete debugger UI, and much more.

Redesigned Getting Started Sample Series

We’ve completely rewritten from scratch our Getting Started series based on customer input.  The new series is now 17 parts and shows step-by-step how to add features to a syntax language.  The resulting language can do everything from parsing and code outlining, to text formatting and automated IntelliPrompt.  This is now the best place to go to learn how to tie SyntaxEditor’s features together using best practices.

Printing Support

The Silverlight SyntaxEditor now has printing support, with optional built-in margins and the ability to inject custom margins.

IntelliPrompt Quick Info Provider for Parse Errors

A new built-in language service can be registered to automatically show an IntelliPrompt quick info tip when the mouse hovers over a parse error.

Ident Provider and Text Formatter Services

New language services have been created to support customizable smart indent for a language, and the ability to format part or all of a document based on language-specific rules.

Exit of Beta Status

Even though SyntaxEditor has been very stable and production-quality for quite a while now, we have finally removed the beta tag off the product.  This means that Blueprint licenses for Silverlight Studio now include source code.

Web Languages Add-on

We’ve ported the WPF version of the Web Languages Add-on to Silverlight.  Features include automated IntelliPrompt quick info for elements and attributes, AST generation, code outlining, XML syntax error display, mouse hover quick info for syntax errors, end tag auto-complete, line commenting, and text formatting.

Unfortunately Microsoft hasn’t ported the XmlSchema and related classes to Silverlight yet.  Thus the Silverlight port of this add-on doesn’t contain the automated IntelliPrompt completion lists or schema-based validation that its WPF counterpart does.  The Web Languages Add-on is sold separately from Silverlight Studio.

Views

Book Control

In this release, we've added a new book control that allows you to render any Silverlight content within its pages.

Realistic Page Turning Animations

Page transitions are completely animated using sophisticated curling algorithms.  Hot spot areas at the page corners curl towards the mouse and the page turn follows the mouse exactly like a real book’s pages would turn.

Fully Data-Bindable

The items/pages of the book can be specified explicitly or you can bind the book to an existing collection, including support for DataTemplates and Styles.  We have several samples that show how to bind the book to a custom data source.

Supports Virtualization

The Book control fully support for UI virtualization, which increases performances and decreases memory.  Enabled by default, only the pages required to render the view correctly are created.

Embed Any Control

Like any other ItemsControl, the Book control can host any WPF content or controls.

Page Transparency

Semi-transparent pages are fully supported too, meaning that you can layer multiple pages on top of each other.  Each layer can then be presented as a union of all the pages below it.

Summary

Download Silverlight Studio 2010.2 now for free to try out all these new features.

We’re pleased to announce that the upcoming Silverlight Studio 2010.2 version will add printing support to SyntaxEditor, our syntax-highlighting code editor control for the Silverlight platform.

This screenshot shows SyntaxEditor for Silverlight and the mouse is about to press the Print button in the toolbar, which calls the new SyntaxEditor.ShowPrintDialog method.

The built-in Windows printing dialog is displayed allowing the user to select a printer.  In this case we’ll send our printout to OneNote.

The printed page pops in.  Line numbers and whitespace can optionally be displayed.  A configurable document title can be set to display at the top of each page (not shown above) and page numbers appear at the bottom of each page.

Similar to our editor view margin extensibility features, you can create completely custom margins for printouts too.

We hope to launch Silverlight Studio 2010.2 in the next several days.

What we accomplished

In Quarter 3 of 2010 we made some very large enhancements to the controls in WPF Studio, and published the WPF Studio 2010.2 version.  See our newsletter for a summary and screenshots that show what was updated.

To quickly review, SyntaxEditor’s new LL(*) Parser Framework was added in 2010.2, opening the door for us to work on language add-ons similar to the WinForms SyntaxEditor version.  The Web Languages Add-on with an advanced XML language implementation was the first language add-on made available. 

Ribbon, Docking/MDI, Navigation, and other products received Office 2010 theme updates. 

Docking/MDI added complete layout (including MDI area) serialization options and other new serialization and UI features. 

PropertyGrid got performance enhancements and support for nested categories.

Views added a new Book control.

What’s coming next

We’ll be continuing to enhance our WPF controls in the coming weeks.  We have some more Editors and Views controls in the works.  We also will be working on the backstage view for Ribbon.

In the SyntaxEditor realm, we’ll be continuing to add new features and will be beginning work on a WPF/Silverlight version of the .NET Languages Add-on.

For Silverlight, we will be releasing Silverlight Studio 2010.2 very soon.  This new version adds all the recent SyntaxEditor updates (LL(*) Parser Framework, Web Languages Add-on, etc.) and adds the Book control to Views.

Blog post list

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

Several customers reported some issues with the updates made in Docking/MDI for the first 2010.2 build.  One of the enhancements we made caused several side effects which were all related to the same issue.  We’ve resolved the issue and have posted an important WPF Studio 2010.2 build 531 maintenance release you’ll want to grab.  It’s available now on our site.

New features

The new build 531 also adds some neat new features to a couple products.

Gauge

One new feature added to Gauge is the ability to place text on pointer needles.  We have options for how to orient the text too.  It can move exactly with the needle, can always render horizontally, or can move with the needle but intelligently flip upside-down when appropriate so that the text continues to render right-side-up such as in this screenshot:

Linear gauges also get easy-to-use text pointer labels.

Both circular and linear gauges also receive new features for managing refresh rate, similar to an existing feature we have with our digital gauges.

This feature is useful when there is a high update rate of data sent to the gauge.  The refresh rate will buffer the updates that appear in the UI to a designated refresh rate.  So instead of having a gauge pointer flipping all over and being difficult to read, you can set it up to just update a couple times a second and it will animate much slower, thus making the gauge data easier to visually consume.

Another new feature added is the ability to render lowercase letters in the digital gauges via a new character casing option.  Choose to force characters to lowercase, uppercase, or render text as-is.

SyntaxEditor

A great update to SyntaxEditor is the new indent provider service.  This service can be registered on your language to tell the editor how to indent code when the Enter key is pressed.  Options are no indent, block indent, or smart indent.

Previous builds of SyntaxEditor for WPF used no indent, but the default has now been made to block indent if no indent provider service is registered on a language.  That means that when pressing Enter, text will move to the same indentation as the previous line.

Smart indent allows a language to programmatically indicate how to indent a line.  This means in C# for instance, you can scan back to see if you are right after a { character and indent a tab stop if so.

Another new service is a basic interface for supporting the formatting of text ranges.  Text formatting involves adjusting whitespace and symbols such as braces to make code more readable.

We’ve added some documentation on these new features and will be adding some samples of their usage hopefully in the next build.

Update on Silverlight Studio 2010.2

We are currently finishing up work on Silverlight Studio 2010.2.  We hope to have it out even as early as next week.

The 2010.2 version will have the new Book control in Views, along with all the SyntaxEditor updates made in WPF Studio 2010.2 such as the new LL(*) Parser Framework, indent provider and text formatter services, the Web Languages Add-on, and more.