Today I wanted to give a quick update on the status of development here at Actipro.
First for our Docking/MDI for WPF product, we have the recently-announced MVVM features complete and ready to go. We previously asked for beta testers to help try out the new features and have a list of customers waiting to try them out.
Before we get the beta out, we’re trying to get Prism (Composite WPF) integration completed as well since a number of the MVVM customers were using it and would find these features very helpful. We should have the beta ready for the first or second week of January.
Second, we have been continuing work on the SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on for WPF. The C# grammar is looking great so far and we should have its unit tests complete in the coming days.
We’ve begun work on the VB grammar and are continuing to move forward on it each day.
We’d like to start a list of beta testers for the .NET Languages Add-on too. The add-on’s beta test will focus on usage of the advanced C# language to parse documents in the background as they are edited, thus producing an AST, reporting parse errors via squiggle lines, and driving automatic outlining (code folding). Once the VB grammar is complete, we’ll want help testing the same features for it too.
If you are a customer and are interested in helping test these upcoming features out, please e-mail us or comment in this post. Make sure you indicate which features you’d like to test.
Today I’d like to post a status update on the progress of the SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on for WPF. For more information on the add-on’s development, please see the previous posts in this series:
We’ve continued working on the C# grammar implementation that uses our LL(*) Parser Framework. More...
There has been a lot of customer interest in when the SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on for WPF will be ready. About a month ago we posted the general design stages that are needed to create the add-on.
Today I’d like to review some of the new features being added to our LL(*) Parser Framework and Language Designer in version 2011.1, and will also show some screens of the C# grammar in action. More...
Yesterday we posted that we are looking for beta testers to work with the new MVVM support features coming to our Docking/MDI for WPF product in the 2011.1 version. Beta testers will be able to access the new functionality before 2011.1 is officially released.
Going along with that theme, we’ve had several customers request official support for Prism (Composite WPF), a Microsoft guidance designed to help build rich and flexible WPF desktop applications. In the past, one of our guru customers had made an open-source set of classes to allow integration of Docking/MDI with Prism and he shared the work with the community via our forums.
Now that our native MVVM support features have been completed for Docking/MDI 2011.1, we’re considering creating an official Prism integration assembly that harnesses our new MVVM features, and placing it in our open source contrib project.
Today I’d like to ask how much interest there is out there in us implementing such an integration assembly. Please comment below if you’d like to see these features added. And if you’d like to beta test them when we do implement them, please follow the directions in yesterday’s call for beta testers post.
Thanks for your input, we want to make sure Docking/MDI continues to be the premier docking window product for WPF.
Several weeks ago we posted that we were actively working on a series of updates to add true MVVM support to the Docking/MDI for WPF product.
These new features work similarly to a standard ItemsControl but are optimized for use with document/tool windows. For instance if you wish to databind your document view model objects to auto-generate DocumentWindow wrappers, you simply bind the new DockSite.DocumentItemsSource property to a collection of view models.
You can use customized DataTemplates to render the docking window content area, and can configure ItemContainerStyle styles to bind properties like docking window titles to your view models.
Beta Testers Wanted
The features described above and more will be part of the WPF Studio 2011.1 release, which is still several weeks away. However we are looking for some customers to beta test them in advance of the official release.
If you are an WPF Studio customer with an active subscription and are looking to use these new MVVM features in your own applications, please contact us via e-mail to discuss how to participate in the beta test.
We are only looking for testers who will actively be using the new MVVM feature set and will provide feedback on them. Multiple new samples and full documentation on the feature set will be available with the beta test.
We look forward to hearing from you.
We’re pleased to announce that WPF Studio 2010.2 build 533 has been released and is now available for download.
See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.
Yesterday we redeployed Silverlight Studio due to an issue with the SyntaxEditor Language Designer application that was discovered. Namely a licensing exception was occurring in a couple places where our .NET Languages Add-on was used. No other code changes were made to the actual Silverlight Studio products so the build number was not changed.
If you use the Language Designer and experienced this issue, please redownload the latest Silverlight Studio build to get the fix that will allow you to properly use all the features of the Language Designer application.
We’ve just published our December 2010 newsletter with details on recent development at Actipro, and some notes on what is coming in the short term.
Be sure to check it out!
We’ve just posted a new maintenance release for our WinForms controls. The release includes an updated Shared library along with various enhancements to SyntaxEditor and its add-ons.
The detailed list of changes are available in this forum post.
SyntaxEditor Control
A free new Ruby language definition is now included in the samples, and several minor tweaks and fixes were made.
Web Languages Add-on
Major improvements were made to support xs:any in automated IntelliPrompt.
.NET Languages Add-on
Numerous enhancements to C# and VB automated IntelliPrompt were made, particularly in the areas of implicitly-typed variables in a C# foreach statement, generic methods, and delegates.
